


Dragonshadow: End of an Era

by webkilla



Category: Skin Deep (Webcomic)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, F/M, Fanfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:34:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 51,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24867649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webkilla/pseuds/webkilla
Summary: This story is partially based on the Webcomic Skin Deep by Kory Bing – it can be considered AU fanfiction. It is a world of magical and political secrets that would not do well if the light of day was shined upon them, and those who fight to keep these secrets hidden – or render them exposed. Also, dragons – somehow.  Also, while there will be a number of jabs at the Harry Potter books and its concepts, then I am totally not the owner of that property, so like don’t sue.
Relationships: OC/OC





	1. Politics and Murder

I had honestly thought that this would be just another of mum’s boring museum function in the middle of July. I mean, we were in Prague and there were all these fine pubs all over town me and Mel wanted to try. Ok, hold on, that’s no way to start this – sorry.

My name is Frederik Mannheim, and I was in Prague in some museum I’d never heard of nor cared to learn of, attending an unveiling of some random shite my mother got her hands on. I’m here with my sexy little girlfriend Melati Kasih. That name should sound familiar to some of you. Ever heard Kasih Invest? Singaporean merchant bank? No? Me neither, at least until I met Mel while studying at Bristol – right freak in the sack she was, and she could drink me under the table despite being at least forty pounds and a foot smaller than me. Bloody Indonesian. And yes, she doesn’t mind me writing that about her – at the time she took great pride in being able to drink me under the table and then ravish me. If I had only known how she was doing that…

Anywho, we were standing in this hallway in a museum in Prague. The air smelled like cheap Slavic aftershave and of the heavily perfumed chemical detergent the locals used to clean the old tiled floors with. The interior itself was classy enough, in its ‘this place was built just after the fall of the soviets, but not soon enough for our architects to catch up’ style: Me and Mel could see all kinds of exhibits in glass cases that we could not care less for – you see, we were looking for a place to have us a snog and maybe indulge in a cheeky shag.

This was quite normal for us: I mean, an early twenty-something couple at an event where their actual participation is in no way required? Back at Bristol we had met some two semesters ago. I don’t even remember what class we had together – only that we’d ended up sharing notes and doing the bad thing a few weeks later after I had suffered through a rather abrupt breakup with my ex, but the less said about her the better. 

So, poking around the exhibits, away from boring renascence armor displays, we looked for a quiet place to just sit down and make out – maybe engage in some light petting. One thing that did catch my eyes was a display with match-lock dueling pistols. My main hobby, outside of playing CS:GO and out-swearing the Russian players on my usual servers, was target shooting. I wasn’t good enough to be competitive about it, but it was fun and had resulted in me shooting a lot of different firearms at the firing ranges I had been at – but I had never tried a black powder gun. Oh well, back to search for comfy but private seating-arrangements and sticky fingers.

This was not what we found. What we found was a room with a door ajar with guy in a balaclava, with a duffel bag full of lockpicking tools and what looked like some kind of kit-bashed electronic device with a wired up card meant to hack electronic lock systems, working on the locks of a glass case. Basically we stumbled across what looked like a thief breaking into the ancient byzantine exhibition while I had my hands up my girlfriend’s skirt.

At the time we didn’t question why he didn’t run after us – we merely hightailed it to the museum ‘backyard’, where the big reception was happening. There we found hundreds old stuffy men and women with distinguished looks who carried themselves like kings and emperors in their expensive suits and dresses, with all the adornments of what was probably local gentleman club medals and secret society ribbons. They each sounded as if they had already spoken at length about things that I would have found far too boring to listen to. 

Outside the hedged off area in which the big garden party took place we found my mum, as always in her pants suit with that ugly old silver and amber necklace she said she had from her mother. I might have fumbled my words, but I’m certain that between Mel and me we managed to explain what we had seen.

My mum didn’t even look away from the guy she was talking to – some black-haired Chinese-looking bloke with a mean glare who never took his eyes off my mum – no clue what they had been talking about, but he didn’t look happy. She just shoved a note of scribly lines at me and told me to go home if I didn’t like it here. Bloody hell, ‘home’ was like a thousand miles away – or maybe she meant her apartment here in Prague? Fuck it, this was serious – me and Mel pushed on.

Alas, we found our way into the garden party in search of someone who’d respond to the thief we found – even if he was probably long gone at this point. The entire courtyard was full of old things – people and exhibits alike. At least a third looked to be asleep… no wonder the thief had chosen this moment to do his break in. Why hadn’t my mum had time help when I needed her? Basically, it was the story of my teenage years at boarding school in Denmark all over, her ignoring me when something important was happening because of work.

Among the sea of grey hair and unmistakably expensive business suits and formal wear, I managed to spot one gent that I had seen deal with my mother on several prior occasions. Approaching him was as navigating a sea of old people smell and even older people who seemed genuinely offended that I would dare to interrupt their boredom, to bring my message across.

Ok, the guy I spotted was a middle eastern gent, dignified, sharp suit, with a leather-bound attaché case next to him. It didn’t have the usually floppy loose leather handle – it had a solid almost square-looking handle… oh well – who cared?

To my luck he seemed to recognize me – though like everyone else he seemed more displeased to meet me than anything else.

“I saw a burglar in the byzantine exhibition! Where is security!?” I frantically asked. I hadn’t even noticed that Mel had been separated from me as I pushed through the crowd.

With his left hand the man took hold of his suitcase and stood up. Had I bothered him enough that he would simply up and leave? Really? No – he called out an elderly woman who sat a few rows in front of him, though not before muttering “I guess we’re starting now then…” in heavily far-east accented English.

With a loud and clear voice – like some of my more zealous environmentalist professors back at Bristol when talking about the evils of capitalism – the man hollered: “Councilor Gijo – you have stated your opinion on our plight well enough. I and my fellows are here to present our last objection”

The old lady – truly, a granny by all accounts, with a face wrought of more wrinkles than actual skin – got up surprisingly quickly and turned to face her accuser with all the fury that her Hispanic appearance afforded her. Whatever their row was about was beyond me, but somehow the guy had managed to pull an uzi-looking gun from his suitcase without ever opening it…. And the top bit of the guns looked like their suitcase handles.

The granny looked like a Spanish Victorian fashion show reject – and mind you, she did behave accordingly: With a calm and oh so snooty tone she dismissed the gunman’s statement with a derisive: “Put that away before you get into even more trouble than you’re in…”

It was as if she didn’t even care that he was pointing an automatic at her.

Neither did the people around the two – though plenty turned to look at them. I could swear that most of them were smirking. Did they think this bloke was bluffing? That I wasn’t freaking out was likely more to do with the four or five drinks I had chugged with Mel at the dinner reception earlier…

Then the guy shot the granny. Single bullet to the head. No exit wound.

She hadn’t hit the ground before the entire crowd blew up in panic. For some reason it seemed like there were more people there now that they were all screaming at the top of their lungs and trying to get away.

…mind you, I was also screaming. This was far beyond the kind of excitement I like - my Kilkenny drinking contests and girlfriend drama back at Bristol.

The tide of bodies that shoved and pushed to get out of the garden party area pushed me back into the museum proper. There was more automatic gunfire, but I couldn’t see a thing – only people screaming, pushing… I couldn’t tell if someone was getting trampled, but honestly it wouldn’t surprise me with how things sounded.

Between faint whiffs of gunpowder, a smell I knew well from the marksmanship contests I’d been going to for the last few years, and a group of particularly panicky men who seemed far too metrosexual to not be poofs, I ended up in one of the museum men’s toilets.

It looked like the tile-work had been glued on about three days before the velvet revolution – and it looked even more so as if they hadn’t really bothered finishing the job. The smell of sick from two of the five stalls didn’t help either… but the imminent sense of panic made us all ignore it. The only thing that mattered right now was survival.

With six pairs of eyes to look for a way out it didn’t take long for us to spot the ajar window three yards up on the far wall. Judging from the sounds we could hear from the window, it led straight to the outside of the museum. Score – only problem was that it was clearly made so no sneaky cunt could shimmy in through it… at least for fully grown cunts like the jokers I was with.

It took two of the fat poofs to try to cram their flab through the tiny window for them to give up. Somewhere deep inside I silently thanked Mel for taking me to the co-ed gym in Bristol. If it wasn’t because she got off on me being all sweaty I probably wouldn’t have been fit enough to get through the window – well… almost.

When I was halfway through, trying to get my hips to get through without ripping my skin off on the old rusty window-frame, a gunman burst into the bog. I could only hear it… and I was too high up for the cunt to grab me… but that didn’t stop him from shooting me in the leg.

I can’t begin to put into words how much it hurt. Then again, falling head first into a Prague back alley didn’t help either. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe it was the thoroughly based look from the cab driver, who didn’t seem to care that I was bleeding from my leg when he drove me back to my mother Prague flat, but I… just realized that I didn’t know if my mother or girlfriend was alive.

In short I felt like shit. The burning sensation from the disinfectant in the first aid kit didn’t help either – and I’ve seen enough episodes of CSI to know that if there’s no exit wound, then the bloody bullet was still inside me.

It was in fear that the gunmen who’d attacked the museum might be casing out the local emergency rooms, which kept me from going straight to the nearest hospital – but as I lay in bed hopped up on painkillers, bucket next to the bed in case I got sick again, with my leg bandaged as well as I could, the only thing I could think of was whether me mum and Mel were still alive as I cried myself to sleep. Would not recommend the experience to others.

Ideally the story should have ended there: I should have hightailed it to the British embassy the next morning, gotten proper medical treatment, then a flight back to Bristol and then let the authorities do their work.

Instead I woke up as I was tied to one of the few chairs in my mom’s small flat, by a bloke in a black suit with sunglasses who looked suspiciously like one of the Asian gunmen from the museum – with two others, a man and a woman, both dressed in casual clothes, who were taping down some kind of heavy duty saran wrap all around me.

It was first when the black suited fellow pulled out a gun and started to affix a silencer to it that I realized how much this all looked like a scene from Dexter. I was about to get killed and they didn’t want to make a mess on the floor. If only I had known how much I would end up getting used to that sensation over the next two weeks…

Now, as I said I was in the process of being tied up when I woke up. I should have jumped up and run off – but between the pounding pain from the bullet-wound in my calf, the painkillers I’d taken a few hours earlier, and having been awoken mid-sleep, then I wasn’t going anywhere fast. In fact, all I did was vomit down my front. Let me tell you: The feeling of sick running down yourself, when you’re stark naked, is not a pleasant one. It was then the black suit finished putting on the silencer.

He looked around at the two others and said something in some language I didn’t recognize. I wouldn’t have known if it was polish, Russian or Hungarian… but then again, I had other things on my mind at that point.

Two hard knocks on the door later, and the gunman and his two mooks stopped dead in their tracks. A few seconds later there were two more knocks – and a woman’s voice called out, but the front door to the flat were one of those reinforced fire-proof ones, which didn’t let much sound though, so it was all too muffled to properly hear, at least to me.

The gunman nodded towards the tiny hallway that had the front door – the small flat we were all in being a simple two-room deal with a miniscule separate bathroom and kitchen. They dropped their Dexter-grade wrap and pulled out handguns of their own and headed off around the corner, out of sight.

Two surprised huffs followed, and two flashes of light from around the corner. The two goons did not respond when the remaining gunman called out for them. What the hell was going on? He looked nervous. Feeling just ever so slightly gutsy, and no small amount of spiteful in the face death, I ran my mouth at the man: “Looks like someone’s in trouble now…”

That was when he pistol whipped me and I passed out. I probably also puked down myself – again, though I first noticed that when I woke up again.

I woke up from a pretty young black girl shaking me and slapping across the face. The burning pain from the mild acid burns on my stomach, thighs and groin kicked in after I came to – and made me wish that I hadn’t woken up.

“You ok?” she asked. Her accent was… non-descript. It was British for sure, not American – but with a strange and indistinct immigrant twist. It had a hint of something I hadn’t really heard before…  
She was pretty – well, not my type – too butch, but still. Her features had that unique gaunt and petite African twist, plus she was a good three inches taller than me – and I was six foot one already. Her hair was short, almost crew-cut, but with those black curls that would turn into a wicked afro if you let it grow. Oh, and she was wearing a bloodstained brightly colored yellow and orange dress… and at that point I recalled that I was still naked, half-covered in my own sick, and tied to a chair.

She slapped me again and asked me again. I shouted: “No bloody hell I’m not! I’m tired, I feel like shit, my leg is killing me, and three gunmen just tried to kill me!”

She just smiled and tipped the chair over. I was busy screaming on the way down to notice the pillow she had placed so I didn’t hit my head on the floor – then again I couldn’t really turn to look. She then brought a bucket and a washcloth and rinsed off my leg – the shot one. I don’t know what kind of detergent she used, but it stung like hell. That’s one hell of a way to wake up…

…when she then fetched some pliers and began to dig out the bullet I passed out again, this time from the pain. Would very much not recommend that experience.

When I came to again, I was back in my bed. I had been cleaned up, my leg didn’t hurt nearly that much anymore, and it had fresh bandages on – and the black girl was sitting at the end of the bed, looking at me. That wasn’t creepy at all, no, not at all.

“Right, you’re up – let’s get going. This place won’t be safe for much longer” she said, painfully matter of factly. While I did feel better – I was even cleaned off and all – then I didn’t feel like going anywhere.

As she stood by with a withering glare and watched as I dressed myself, a very awkward experience to put it mildly, I humbly asked if she knew what was going on.

“I don’t know… I really don’t – but right now our priority is to get to a safehouse and hold out for further instructions” She said. Her accent wasn’t Indian or middle-eastern. African perhaps? She certainly had the skin-color for it.

I honestly didn’t mind the idea of creeping into a hidey hole and wait for someone to come and explain what was going on – but one thing still bothered me, or rather two: “What about my mother, or Mel?”

“I don’t know – last I saw your mother was at the museum event, but your girlfriend? Hmm…” gun-girl said, looking pensive. 

She pulled out a generic looking smartphone and dug through some map-looking apps. I tried to peek, but she didn’t cooperate much. After half a minute of poking around she triumphantly stood up: “Yes!”

With no further explanation she had me pack a ‘go-bag’ with a spare set of clothes, ID, passport, cash, and some light snacks… and then we were off in a van with dark-tinted windows, heading out towards the highways surrounding Prague. I hadn’t even thought to question what she had done to the three gunmen at the flat, let alone where she had hidden the bodies… bloody hell was I being double-kidnapped here?

While I drove, it was my black savior/possible kidnapper who directed me – because I couldn’t read a single one of the road signs we passed. After a short while we came up alongside a truck convoy. The trucks didn’t have any labels or logo showing what company they were hauling cargo for, though considering where we were it was probably some off-the-books delivery for the Russian mob or something – Mum had always complained how the Russian mob had their grubby mitts in everything in Eastern Europe.

“Keep your eyes on the road and keep us next to the second truck” she said, as she suddenly clambered back to the passenger seats and fiddled with her smartphone some more.  
“I don’t even know your name” I half-shouted while looking at the rear-view mirror for a brief moment.

In the mirror I saw her look up and glare straight into my eyes: “If we survive this, I might be allowed to tell you…”

I couldn’t tell what was going on, but suddenly the truck I was driving next to swerved momentarily and slowed down real quick. She shouted for me to pull over along with it – I didn’t ask questions, because my leg hurt enough from managing the gas pedal.

We both started to get out, but she produced a gun that looked an awful lot like the one the chief gunman at the flat had waved around – silencer and all. My head hurt looking at it – she told me to stay in the car for a moment while she got rid of the lorry drivers. I got the distinct feeling that I would be shot if I tried to get away.

Traffic sped by as if nobody cared that two big lorries had just pulled over with… all their tires somehow blown out. What the bloody hell? As I finally got out the air smelled like gasoline and ripe refuse chucked along the edge of the road. This couldn’t be good for my leg.

Looking around the back of the front lorry something struck me as very odd: How did the gun-girl, for a lack of a better name, get the big steel padlock open on back end of the truck? It looked like she had put a blowtorch to it – she just stepped out of the way as the loading ramp fell down and the door swung open, revealing the grim cargo within.

The sight that met me was like something out of one of those sex slave smuggling documentaries that the BBC would air every now then: Four rows of men and women, young and old, and children as well, all in heavy metal chains… and a lot of them looked like they had been bludgeoned into submission, even the kids.

Gun-girl told me go look out if anyone else was coming to investigate. The tone of her voice was harsh, and unmistakably hinting that both me and the rest of the general public wasn’t meant to be looking inside the truck hold right now.

After I had walked over to the side of the road and started to look around, I heard some strange noises that reminded me of the burning hiss of arc-welders – quickly followed by a lot of chain rattling and people shuffling around. That was when all the now freed prisoners began pouring out of the truck. Gun-girl quickly repeated the same scene with the other truck: She worked fast.

It was when people started crawling out of the second truck I that I spotted Mel in the crowd and ran up to her. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy – I didn’t even feel my leg hurting as I ran over and hugged her.

This was when people started coming up to me, thanking me for rescuing them. I kept saying that it was mostly gun-girl who’d rescued them, but few seemed to buy that, especially a couple of grannies: They said I was taking on after my parents, with my mother’s courage and my father’s resolve – wait what?

“We won’t forget this young man” one of them said, her colorful clothes and accent making me think she was Brazillian or something. Right, I mean it was nice that they were grateful, but how did this make them think I was getting into art dealing? The hell did my mother do for a living? How did these people know my mother – and did they know my father? Mother had never talked about who my father was – and I had never asked, for it had never been something we had spoken of, at least not since that one time when I had been five when she’d told me he was dead and had never been part of my life.

I was about to ask about what they meant with my parents when gun-girl came around and started shouting, commanding everyone to disperse and get to safety. It was at this moment that it occurred to me that me and gun-girl would have to somehow hide about a hundred people. Where were we going to put them so the terrorists weren’t going to get them? Could we go to the police about this?

As it turned out, then that was a moot point. The grannies started organizing people into groups and people started walking off, away from the highway, disappearing into the countryside beyond whatever Prague suburb we were outside of. I was ordered back into the car we had arrived in, with Mel tagging along – though gun-girl wasn’t entirely pleased by that.

“Are you implying that you have a choice in the matter?” Mel sternly noted, sounding strangely haughty considering that she not five minutes ago she had looked like someone about to auctioned off to sexual slavery by ISIS.

I could only shrug and contemplate if there were other people in other trucks being taken places.

“Hey how did you find us? They tossed all our phones and stuff back at the museum” Mel asked, as we walked towards the car.

Gun-girl gestured towards Mel’s neck: “I know of your parent’s insurance policies. You have a tracking device in your neck – I’ll need to de-active or remove that before we get to the safe house”

As the daughter of rich Singaporean merchant bankers, then I guess that made sense. I failed to take notice of the question of how gun-girl was going to turn such a tracking chip off – mainly due to what happened next: 

Back in the car Mel sat shotgun while gun-girl got in the back and the two had a brief exchange while I tried my darndest to get back into the Czech highway traffic. It was almost as difficult as comprehending what happened next, which only made me think even less of the tracking chip or how gun-girl was going to turn it off.

“Gods I am so happy you got us all out of there – and you two working together now? That is so awesome! We can finally relax” Mel said – or something to that effect, getting really comfy in her seat. If it had been just the two of us those moves tended to mean that she wanted to fuck around. 

“No. Don’t – this car isn’t secure and we still need to get to safety” gun-girl quickly said, but it was too late…

The girl next to my, my girlfriend, Mel… wasn’t there anymore. Whatever that thing was, it was about my height, green, covered in fine smooth snake-like scales, looking like a lizard alien – and I wasn’t looking at the road anymore. That’s when the screaming began, namely me screaming, and then we hit something. Last thing I remember hearing was Mel’s voice going “Recall!”


	2. You're a Lizard Harry

I awoke feeling six shades of fucked up. My chest hurt, my bloody shot up leg still hurt, and wherever I was smelled like cheap Indian food, bad coffee and… mineral oil? Was I back in my dorm? No, no I was not.

Wherever I was, the place looked very Spartan. Like, a mix between ‘This place was built on a budget’ and ‘The cleaning lady nicked all the furniture and wallpaper’ – though the large scratch-marks around the doorknobs were a bit unsettling, like, Jurassic park unsettling. Not even attack dogs left claw-marks like that.

At this point I became keenly aware of how lumpy and hard the ‘mattress’ I was resting on was. Like, what slept on this last time? A hippo in plate-mail armor? Oh, and I had apparently been relieved of my shoes and socks. The answer to at least my first first question revealed itself as I sat up: There was no mattress – I was in a cot made of tough fabric strung out over a very basic steel frame. 

The lack of socks and shoes made the bare concrete floor exceedingly unpleasant and cold to navigate, though the main challenge seemed to be dodging the neat little piles of crumbled up protein bar wrappers, crusty old paper coffee cups and torn up bits of paper that littered the floor. At the door to the tiny room I was in, I could hear gun-girl and Mel somewhere chat on the other side:

“He doesn’t know anything. That was the deal - so can’t we just leave him here?” Mel suggested, making me think all kinds of things, like what is it I don’t know, or what deal she had made, who was the deal with, where is here, and where are they planning on going? 

“Not in the cards. Promised his mum I’d keep him safe, last in the line and all” gun-girl said, confusing me even more. What kind of fucked up James Bond movie was I in?

I wanted to know – so barging in, I said as much, though likely not in terms nearly that polite or coherent – then I remembered that my leg hurt and I doubled over in pain. Mel was there in an instant helping me up, while gun-girl lamented: “For fucks sake – we can’t have him freaking out like that when we move to a proper safe-house”

“But back in the car – you saw how he freaked out – we should just leave him here, it’s better for him…” Mel said in a strangely disappointed tone. Why the hell was she trying to ditch me?

“There’s no money or food left here, and if he leaves he won’t be able to get back in. This is hardly a place to sit this out” Gun-girl noted, though at the moment I was busy trying to get my throbbing leg to stop hurting.

“Well where are we supposed to go then, with him?” Mel asked as she helped me over to the shitty and rusty foldable chair she had been sitting on.

Gun-girl suggested that we all tried to come up with some ideas.

Having finally sat down and taken a few breaths, I demanded that the two stop acting like I’m not there and bloody tell me what is going on, where we are, who gun-girl is, what the fuck happened in Praque and where the fuck they’re planning on running off to while leaving me here. Shouting that much made my leg hurt.

After a second or two my outburst finally took effect, with Mel shrugging and going “Fine – oh don’t give me that look” to gun-girl, then she turned into a giant lizard person and I screamed like a little girl once more. It wasn’t my proudest moment looking back, but I won’t deny it happening. 

But honestly, what else could I do? My girlfriend looked like something out of a video game, like a female Argonian reptile woman from that Skyrim game! Or like the bad lizard-people photoshops that The Sun usually do with the royal family.

Well, at the time I honestly wasn’t sure if she was my girlfriend any more – the possibility that she was some kind of alien pod-people ‘replacing real people with shapeshifting aliens’ sort did briefly cross my mind.

“I told you, he’s not going to be any use – and we should go to my family in Singapore, we’ll be safe there” Lizard-Mel said. At the time I mainly wondered how the fuck she was talking. She looked like a comic book monster or villain or something. Lizard people from the center of the earth… wait, hadn’t Mel already done this back in the car? What the hell…

What followed was a brief but earth-shattering up-ending of my understanding of how the world worked. Apparently magic was a thing, as was various kinds of shapeshifting people collective called nohde, as opposed to human, and it seemed that a nohde coup or civil war had started off. That was also all I was told at that point – because apparently the two couldn’t agree on how much I needed to know since I was apparently just baggage at the moment.

“I’ve already checked. What’s left of the council is in panic. Nobody knows where anything is safe, and while we’ve been waiting for sleeping beauty to wake up I’ve tracked at least six pickups at Vaclav Havel of people trying to leave for international flights” Gun-girl said, explaining that by pickups she meant Nohde who were caught and spirited away into captivity by unknown forces.

Considering what I had been through I couldn’t help but ask if they too would be Dexter’d, like what was tried on me.

“They’re cleaning house from the looks of it – it’s a massacre… and all I got on how they’re doing it is this” gun-girl said, producing a tiny nugget of black material.

It turned out that it was the bullet she had pulled out of me. Suddenly my leg throbbed again. Still, how does one bullet prove anything?

Turned out that was a very bad thing to say, for reasons that would first become clear to me much later. Either way Mel gave me the stink-eye something furious and gun-girl just facepalmed: “Right, you don’t know anything. Maybe you’re right Mel, we could just drop him off at an Avalon”

“Oi, chopped liver here?” I said – or something to that effect, along with a far less politely worded request that I be filled in on what they were talking about, instead of just being constantly reminded that I didn’t know anything.

“Unless you know how to dodge secret agents and trained mercenaries that use magic then shush” Gun-girl admonished, sounding increasingly annoyed.

“We can give him some of the stash-money and leave him at the avalon, or in a hotel under a false name” Mel suggested, again confusing me as to whether she really cared for me or not, with how she seemed to want to get rid of me.

“No stash money – whoever was here last didn’t file for a refill – and there’s no council right now to get new paperwork for that. You two stay here, if I’m not back my dusk you should try to escape to Singapore” Gun-girl said before leaving.

At this point gun-girl left to check this ‘Avalon’ place, leaving me with Mel who was acting very cold and distant – at the time I thought it was because she was worried as me about other friends or family who might have been caught up in this terrorist nosh, though I hated the fact that she wouldn’t explain to me what was going on or why they wanted to ditch me.

Gun-girl texted me back an hour or so later: “Lon Av compromised. Pack up, be ready to leave in twenty mins” Part of me was horrified that this Avalon place was compromised, even though I had no clue how it was compromised, or what an Avalon even was, but on the other hand I was overjoyed that I wouldn’t be left behind. Also I had not at any time given Gun-girl my phone number... so how had she texted me?

Mel did not share my enthusiasm – in fact, she seemed cross.

In retrospect I am fully aware of how awkward the situation was and how annoying I must have been, wanting to know everything when none of them knew if there was even time for a full debriefing – but that changed when we prepared to move out… apparently gun-girl feared the safe-house we were in would be raided soon – it seemed that the terrorists were sweeping all of the safehouses in Prague.

As part of changing my bandages before we left we found that there weren’t any signs of infection and it only hurt if I stomped hard on the leg – but my leg still did not really look that good. I was given a fresh set of the cheapest and most casual second-hand clothes I have ever seen. Only thing missing was a Burberry cap and I would have looked full on chav, while Mel and gun-girl – in their cheap brightly colored track-suits – looked like cheap gopnik slags.

The change of clothes were apparently standard procedure for this kind of deal – never mind that I didn’t really know where we were at the time – but another part of procedure was to destroy your old set of clothes. For this there was furnance at the safe house, but as my clothes were about to chucked in I recalled the note that my mother had given me and asked for that to be saved.

Gun-girl was suddenly very curious and demanded to see this note, then she started shouting and whooping in some African language. Apparently she could read whatever language my mother had written the note in. I sure couldn’t.

It was an address to a location in a place called Tartus. Some google mapping later and we knew that it was a city in Syria on the coast. All I could think was “Aren’t they still in a civil war? Or getting invaded by that Islamic State lot?”

Apparently, that didn’t matter – but what did matter was some kind of sigil on the note that I simply couldn’t see, which only reacted to my presence. As Mel put it “It’s a blood-seal, it only works on someone the writer is related to. Fred needs to be there to open the safe-house seals to let us in”

“Great - Fred, you’re coming with us – Mel, if that place has other survivors we’ll be infinitely better off than staying here or risking getting grabbed in the airport” gun-girl said, settling the matter.

Thus we left the safehouse and exited into a London back-alley on the border of one of the industrial harbor parts of the city. How we had gotten from Prague to London was never explained – but to get to Tartus, or rather near it, without making either EU anti-terrorist authorities worried or the terrorists who’ve been kidnapping Nohde people, we had to take the train under the channel and all the way to some place in France I had never heard of. Had we taken a train from Praque to London in the first place? How long had I been out?

While enroute Adia, that was gun-girl’s name, and Mel tried to explain to me how Nohde society worked, mainly so I would stop freaking out so much – and if the sudden reappearance in London had been my flood of Hogwarts letters down the chimney, then this was my ride on the motorbike: This was when my eyes truly opened to the fact that there was far more than met the eye in this world.

To the already initiated this next bit will seem repetitious and dull, but keep in mind: I learned of this as an adult, not as an infant like how normal Nohde children are taught.

Indeed, on the sleeping train – or whatever the French called their version of the trains where you had a whole bed cot on your ticket – Mel introduced me to Nohde dragon anatomy quite intimately, and to be quite frank then it was no small amounts of traumatic to begin with: I had always enjoyed Mel’s company for her directness and up front style. If not for the fact that she took great joy in buying the latest in European dress and skirt fashion she would have been called a tomboy back in Bristol. However, this assertive and even forceful side of her took on a very different context, which honestly frightened me to no small end when during the night part of our train ride as she snuck into my cabin and tried to get intimate with me… while in what she called her mid-form, a kind of hybrid between a full on dragon and a human. Again, it was that form of an Argonian lizard woman from that Skyrim game came to mind – only this time the only wreck happening was my libido, because my willy didn’t want to go anywhere near something with fangs that large or sharp. 

It might sound a tad rapey, and let’s be honest it was, but Mel did ultimately manage to have her way with me – though, it wasn’t entire non-consensual: Maybe it was still shock from the gunshot wound, maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t really managed to get that much good sleep in the last twenty-four hours, maybe it was having my understanding of reality absolutely annihilated – but I needed the companionship. I needed someone who wasn’t trying to kill me. Fear and confusion always made strange bedfellows – and her skin, while covered in scales, was smooth and like that of a warm snake. Oh, and it turned out that Nohde dragons can retract their teeth and claws, somehow, like how some poison snakes can flatten their fangs plus she had a six-inch tongue. This made for a bloody amazing blowjob – but honestly… in retrospect, I was in no condition to consent to anything at that time, but in her mid-form Mel was a foot taller than me, a lot stronger – and try as I might to rationalize it, or excuse it – then that really wasn’t ok. 

Upon reflection, I realized that all those trashy fantasy romance novels that Mel would read about a couple where the someone would turn into some kind of beast/monster/werewolf/whatever and then have their way with their partner – not always consensually - was a bit more than just an impossible fantasy… it was a fetish – one she finally got to indulge in with me, just in reverse. Bloody Chuck Tingle novels – at least it was dark enough that I couldn’t really see her, only feel her. My first experience seeing real Nohde would come soon enough. 

Also another sad detail: In her midform her amazing bristols were gone – midform dragons would give birth to eggs and didn’t nurse their children. Oh and apparently a pregnant Nohde can’t shapeshift – they will give birth to a child in the same ‘form’ they were in when they conceived, which was part of what the Avalons were around for. Oh the things you learn while cuddling with a giant reptile woman.

After my arguably traumatic initiation into Nohde sexuality and reproduction was over, and having spent a little quiet time crying and rationalizing that what had just been done to me by Mel, had in fact felt good, I sought out Adia to get an idea of what was going on: Adia first told me a little bit about herself: She was from Libya, born in the Nafusa mountains wherever that is. She wasn’t keen on giving me any other personal details, but she did tell me about Nohde society in general and the current plan for the three of us.

Apparently the nearest avalon to where we were going was in Jerusalem – and avalons were apparently hidden communities of Nohde – like, a Diagon alley Harry Potter style setup, where some Nohde lived and existed in their true (not human) forms all day long. Adia told me this because that would be our fallback plan in case Tartus didn’t work out.

Our goal in Tartus was another avalon safehouse, akin to where we had been in London – it would be smaller than the Jerusalem one, but if my mother had wanted me to go there, then it was probably special somehow. Adia hoped that there would be others there, because she didn’t seem to expect us to last all that long without others to help us.

“How long do we have to last? I mean, can’t the police or someone get involved to help us?” I asked – having no clue just how hidden and secret Nohde society was to regular people. Adia cleared that up very quickly: “There are people out there hunting Nohde, and that includes shadows like you”

This led into a brief discussion of the exact nature of Nohde: So apparently there were several kinds, with Adia, Mel and me supposedly being dragon Nohde. Oh, and the plural of Nohde is also Nohde – which is pronounced a bit like when you say chode, but with an n. Dragon grammar, go figure.

Beyond dragons, which of course originated in the far east, there are cows Nohde from India, Gryphons from the British isles, Scarabs in the middle east and northern Africa, Wolves in North America (and yes, they do apparently look like werewolves when in midform…) and then some. Adia did note that today there are Nohde from all over everywhere – they move around and settle down anywhere, just like normal people. There were also types of Nohde that didn’t exist anymore…

This led to the ultimately most interesting topic, as far as I was concerned: the fact that I was supposed to be a dragon. Adia was quick to remind me that I technically wasn’t: I was a ‘shadow’ – a person born as human to Nohde parents, who is essentially locked away from accessing my draconian powers and forms.

So… for all intents and purposes I was a normal average human, but because my mum’s a dragon I was marked for death. Bloody brilliant.

Ok, so obviously Nohde society was big on staying hidden – this was done by upholding something called the Nemean code, as in the mythical Nemean Lion that Hercules slew: The lesson here was simple. Stay hidden, or monster hunters will come and kill you. Apparently in antiquity there were Nohde who lived out in the open, often using their powers and magic to exert influence over mortals – but… well… Hercules and his sort happened. It was decided that Nohde should hide their true nature from society and not reveal that to the public on pain of death. To this end Nohde purposely faded into legend, apparently rewriting a lot of history books in the process – the libraby of Alexandria was burned for that very reason apparently.

“Modern mass media and online social media makes this even more important. Imagine the media hysteria if we’re discovered. The witchhunts, the paranoia – going public is not an option, hasn’t been for millennia” Adia sighed, but she also added that it wasn’t all bad. Apparently Nohde magic allowed for some great advantages over regular human technology and whatnot, though use of it had to be carefully managed to avoid detection. Asking for an example Adia said that scrying magic was often used to find untapped oil and mineral ore deposits – so… Nohde people secretly control much of the world’s mineral supplies?

Adia also tried to teach me how to shapeshift – but apparently I only ‘knew’ myself as a human, and to shapeshift you have to ‘understand yourself’ as more than one thing... and I had no clue how I might be as a dragon, so no dice. Despite what Mel had done to me earlier this obviously made wonder if my package would be any bigger in mid-form or true form – not going to lie – plus I read somewhere once that certain snakes have two dicks. Oh come on - at least I’m being honest about what I was thinking about back then. Do scarab Nohde always commit buggery?

We arrived in some reasonably large French city way too early in the morning for me to bother remembering its name. Adia seemed to know her way around – she certainly spoke French very fluidly – and soon we were on a plane to Larnace International airport – which was on Cyprus apparently.

Now, what the fuck did Cyprus have to do with getting to Tartus? Well, apparently going over land would mean going through Israel, and that was a bad idea because far too many people and authorities would ask questions. Going to Cyprus looked more like Mel had taken her boyfriend and a friend to a vacation hotspot – and the plan was make do the final leg of the journey overseas.

Finding something to eat, Adia explained that the plan was to stay off the map until nightfall, then go she and Mel would go full dragon, and we’d all three fly from Cyprus to Tartus. I couldn’t object, enjoying some truly amazing local shawarma.

We ended up spending most of the day shopping – we all needed new clothes more suited for the warmer climate, since I was still dressed for autumn in Praque, not autumn in the middle-east. Without access any kind of electronic devices – they could be tracked too easily, so Adia had taken our phones and turned them off – then much of the day got surprisingly boring. Sure, there were plenty of lovely beaches and cool sights, but when you constantly trying to stay out of areas under camera surveillance, then you can’t just relax like that.

When nightfall finally came around Adia guided us to an industrial dock. The dock was largely empty, with two large industrial trawlers moored. Repair crews were milling about the two ships, with flashes of welding sparks throwing long shadows all over the place with harsh blue arch-light.

In fresh sneakers we silently moved in the shadows, taking care not to step on rusty fishing gear and worn nets. Adia was following some kind of magic trail or something – neither me or Mel asked. I asked if there weren’t any security cameras around the docks that we had to worry about, but Adia insisted there weren’t.

At a lone pier bathed in darkness Adia told Mel to go first. What happened next I will never forget: Mel crouched down and took a deep breath, only to leap up into the air far higher than any Olympian athlete would ever be able to – and then she vaporized, congealing a second later into a twenty yard long Chinese dragon-looking thing: Short, mostly vestigial arms and legs, with very large claws, and the dim lights from the welders on the trawlers revealing bright green iridescent scales along her length.

I stumbled over backwards in shock and horror, falling off the pier into the water. Not my greatest moment, but a few seconds later I found myself floating out of the water, on a ‘cushion’ of water… somehow. You see, apparently eastern dragons have powers over water – makes sense, seeing as how they used to be worshiped as weather gods or weather spirits.

This also turned out to be how the two had planned on ferrying me to Tartus: Neither Mel or Adia, who had dark brown scales with red highlights, could carry me physically while they were in the dragon forms – they were apparently only just magically boyant. They couldn’t carry riders or cargo. What they could do, was levitate stuff, because magic. Right. I have since learned to stop questioning this kind of stuff.

“Are you ready?” Adia asked, her dragon mouth not really moving. Apparently Nohde in true form didn’t really talk, at least not with the usual air/vocal cords combo. Because magic.

As for whether I was ready at the time, then I said I was, but honestly then it really isn’t that easy to tell. I was resting in a hammock made of magic water I couldn’t sink in. It wasn’t even wet – it was like a thick dry gel, which was moist to the touch, but didn’t make you wet if you pressed up against it. The worst part was that I couldn’t tell how much pressure I could put on the stuff before it would break: Imagine someone telling you to step onto a very thick sheet of paper stretched over a water-filled abyss. You know that its thick, but you also know that its paper.

Once we got underway things went very fast. Adia had shown us a google maps print-out showing us the route she had planned, to avoid any shipping lanes. The distance from Cyprus to Tartus was not short – and yet we reached the place well before dawn, just in time for the fireworks.


	3. Safety, at a cost

The coastline of Tartus was replete with fishing and freight terminals, all of which looked like it got sand-blasted, curtsey of Mother Nature, on a very regular basis. This was apparently a big harbor city – not exactly something you’d ever hear of, or see pictures of, in western news, but if you have a coastline then I guess it’s a given.

Under the cover of darkness the three of us flew close to the water, skirting the surface. Considering how fast we were going; I would probably not have survived impacting with the water here. Thankfully this end of the Mediterranean Sea was very calm that night, so there were no waves to clip my magical seating.

Our flight made no noise from what I could tell – in fact, both of the girl dragons had remained silent during the trip – so when we zipped past moored fishing ships, entering a warehouse district, we drew no attention.

I would later learn that the girls were using magical markers, invisible to the eyes of normies, to find the right warehouse where the Tartus Avalon was hidden.

Considering what had happened in Prague, then I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that the place looked a lot like a refugee camp: There were hundreds of Nohde, not dressed in rags but the amount of luggage, the tired looks, the dusty and dirty clothes - and not a human in sight. There were also stands and stalls – it was like a refugee camp set up in a bazaar, and everyone looked uneasy, that much was sure. A lot of people had obviously taken refuge in the Avalon. The whole place was the size of a, well, large warehouse. It was a big roughly square room, about four or five hundred yards on each side, with plenty of doors along the sides to what was no doubt many a magical hidey hole and hallway, and old stone columns supporting the roof with nice vaulted arches.

Seeing two full scale dragons fly in through the skylight had caused quite a bit of commotion – but nothing beyond a few groups scattering to make room, nothing armed or violent: The Nohde there obviously weren’t expecting visitors, but once they saw that we weren’t armed attackers then they calmed down and basically ignored us.

Adia quickly guided us to a room within the Avalon where we came across a scene straight out Dr. Strange: A half-dragon lizard woman was lying on a table, her clothes torn and bloody – and the piles of bloody bandages and rags on the floor spoke of her injures just the same. Another mid-form dragon stood over her, waving his arms around. Strange lights that defied words and reality streamed from points above his palms, down into the woman on the table, shining in colors that no normal human tongue had words for.

It was then that I recognized the necklace that the woman was wearing… that ugly silver and amber thing my mother always wore.

Mushy greetings followed, tears were shed – basically stuff I’m not that comfortable detailing, but the three of us were also questioned of what we knew – which honestly wasn’t much.

After all that we were taken to a common area, given water and some local kebab and then we were brought up to speed:

First up I got the Nohde political system explained to me by Mel, because I had to understand who the enforcers and knights there worked for: There was a High Council, made up of representatives from each of the Nohde species. Under that there was a ruling council for each Nodhe kind, made up of a dozen or so representatives which were elected by those Nohde – that council then picks someone not from the council for the High Council. All dragon Nohde would swear fealty to the ruling council, who in turn would maintain the peace, uphold the secrecy of their kind and keep things running smoothly.

This was relevant to me because I had to understand that the event in Prague was the election for the European representatives to the dragon Nohde ruling council – and what was going on now was basically a coup attempt, for similar covert election events all over the world had also been attacked, with similar massacres taking place at most of them – that me and Adia had gotten away alive, and that me and Adia had found and freed all those prisoners, had been the first good news to come since the coup had started.  
This was of course a lot to take in – but at that point it felt as if we had all the time in the world. Mother wanted us to hunker down and stay hidden in the Tartus Avalon for the duration of all of this. The idea was to do that until what remained of the council could organize a counter attack, using the three or four dozen of her colleagues – who all looked very ‘private security contractor’ – that is to say, they looked like mercenaries or privately owned military sorts. Was my mother a mercenary?

I wanted to accept all of this at face value – questioning any of this honestly didn’t seem too sensible, since I understood very little of what it was based on – but I did see one flaw in the plan: “Hold up, a counter-attack on who? Do you know who’s behind the coup?”

This led to the second thing I was clued in on: my mother had information on them. Some of the gunmen at Prague were known to have been part of a Nohde lobbying group for years – in her words: “They are rabble-rousers and idiots who wanted to abolish the council system and destroy everything that keeps us secret and safe – I guess they changed strategy on how to make that change happen”

I was not given much in details of how or exactly what the group had lobbied for, but I was told that they were known as the Coral-Scales, because dragons apparently liked scale-names.

Settling down, we were assigned bunks – which Mel quickly managed to fiddle around so me and her slept next to each other. Adia came to us a bit later with dinner. Now, I have always enjoyed a good kebab – and getting the genuine article, made locally, was bloody brilliant – but was this was this how I was going to live now? Kebab three times a day? Like some kind of muggle-refugee, hunted by dragon terrorists and rebels because we dared attend a democratic election? 

Adia quickly pointed out that since the usurpers had attacked me at mother’s apartment, then going back home to my dorm in Bristol probably wouldn’t be safe – I was obviously a target. Bloody lovely.

Things got interesting once mother came in – she was limping, but apparently Nohde would normally heal really quickly. She wanted to talk about the bullet Adia had pulled out of me – apparently this was a big deal.

Ok, so the way it was explained to me, then Nohde are basically bullet-proof. Regeneration, magically tough scales or hide – Nohde could apparently only really be hurt by other Nohde, like through dragon claws, or gryphon beaks, or scarab mandibles, since that was the only kind of stuff that could truly disable a Nohde. This made me wonder how humanity ever became enough of a threat to Nohde, to force us into hiding – but that had apparently been done via grave-robbing: Looting claws, horns and whatnot to wield like weapons. When Hercules slew his first Nemean lions he took their claws and fangs and made a spiked club out of them, making it all the easier to massacre the rest of the species. Lovely – and that’s apparently why there are next to no Nohde from Macedonia left.

Anyway – the bullet from me was interesting because it was whole. All the bullets mother had been hit with, while somehow being able to pierce her, had fragmented and shattered inside her. My bullet was so far the only intact one they had to work with, to figure out what kind of magic had been woven into them to let them harm Nohde like this – there was apparently something about them that messed with the natural Nohde regeneration.

I followed mother into another room that looked like a rejected backdrop for a very expensive Harry Potter knock-off. A thing that looked like a gimbaled gyroscope embedded in the floor spun around very quickly, glowing runes and sigils on it leaving pulsing after images behind as the various rings of the device spun.

The presence of my mother caused the other Nohde to spin the device down, revealing the bullet taken from me at the center of it.

“The scans show nothing – there are no traces on it” one of the dragon-wizards said to some other dragon Nohde, who all were wearing oddly colored military uniforms.

A lot of magic-talk ensued. I understood nothing of it – but the gist seemed to be that everyone thought that the bullets had been enchanted to mess with Nohde healing, but there was no trace of it. It was during this that the need for my presence became evident: I was basically interrogated… about my bullet wound.

Did I look like a bloody med-student?

The dragon Nohde dressed in red and grey military-looking uniforms wanted to know how it had felt, which I couldn’t really say since I had either been knocked out, in shock, or under the effects of Adia’s anesthetic spell most of the time. Sure, I could say that it hurt like hell, but I didn’t exactly have much to compare it to. I was scolded, even shouted at, for being useless on this account – which, truth be told, was not fun. Even my mother looked ashamed, but apparently the dragon-cunt in charge outranked mother. Delightful.

Feeling spiteful towards the end of all the verbal abuse, I pointed out that none of this was really my fault, so blaming me for anything only showed how much of a screw-up they themselves were: “I’m sure proper knights would have nipped all of this in the bud – It’s not my fault your shitty magic sensor can’t find a spell on a bit of copper. Have you even tried looking at the bullet under a microscope?”

Apparently, they had not, but instead of being congratulated for coming up with a potential solution I was scolded for speaking out of turn and to someone above my station… which was apparently anyone, since I was technically still a shadow who shouldn’t even be there. If not for my mother and the fact that I was hunted outside of those walls, I would have very quickly been escorted from the Avalon – but having people out and about who want to kill you made strange bedfellows.

Speaking of bedfellows, once I returned from the knights, wizards and their impotent rage I found that Mel had somehow acquired some curtains, sheets and other bits of knick-knack to decorate our bunks, as well as to give us some privacy. Despite only having a thin flimsy purple curtain drawn around or bunks she still wanted to do the bad thing.

I probably said something rather unkind in response to this, because I felt that she wasn’t taking the situation seriously – I blame stress at the time and the verbal abuse I had just gotten – but Mel got cross with me, arguing that she was just as afraid of how things were going: “Being with you is the only thing I’ve got right now”

So, looking like something not entirely amiss in a Godzilla movie, or maybe more a Godzilla porn-spoof, Mel somehow managed to give me a doe-eyed look, while in mid-form. At least she turned out to be far more gentle in bed this time around, even more so the lights were turned off. Turned out that she knew a tiny bit of magic – enough to quiet things around us, so we couldn’t hear the bustle around us, and others couldn’t hear what we were doing. Others were probably doing the same to get some privacy in their bunk-cubicles.

The next day I was called back in with the knights and wizards of the grumpy dragon. They were less grumpy and shouty this time, but just as commanding: They needed me to give some details on what kind of microscope and kit would be needed to run tests on the bullet. Apparently then forensic microscopes wasn’t something you just went out and bought, at least not really good ones, especially in the ass end of Syria. They had a laptop with an internet connection, which allowed me and a translator to browse around for anything local that might have a microscope. After finding a local vendor of medical supplies I was sent back to the commons again – at least they didn’t shout at me this time.

Three very boring days later I was called in again. A very nice-looking digital microscope had been set up in a corner, and some images from it had been blown up on a widescreen TV next to it.

“Can you tell what that is?” I was asked, the moment I stepped into the room. Ok, simply saying I was asked was an understatement: It was shouted at me, by the same shouty git as before. Smoke did not billow out of his nostrils, but the dragon-man looked about ready to.

The image on the screen was a crisp one, showing a grey metallic surface with evenly speckled with tiny dark irregular spots. The tiny spots were all roughly of the same size, but all of them were in random jagged shapes. I assumed that it was an image of surface of the bullet – and of course I couldn’t tell what the spots were.

“Useless! You said he studied metals!” the knight roared, looking quite ready to pop a gasket.

My mother looked surprisingly meek and apologetic, even motioning for me to apologize. I did not: “Oi, puff, lay of me mum and I! Shouting isn’t going to magically conjure up any new answers from me, because I don’t know any bloody magic, cunt!”

At first the knight gave me the meanest scowl a mortal could ever imagine – but then he seemed to relax, smiled… which involved revealing far too many sharp and pointy teeth, but he looked relaxed none the less: “True, you are but a student – we should be asking your teachers! Tell me, do you know if any of your professors would be able to identify the metal that this bullet is made of and the dark spots?”

I could think of a few – after which the knight nodded, called Adia in to us and then started barking orders: “You two will go to Bristol University and do as ordered. Bring this chit to the bursar in London, use the funds to get the bullet examined, quietly. Return to us with the information, no curriers or transmissions unless it’s an emergency”

Right, so… I had just been drafted. I wanted to object, but anything to break the boredom at this point sounded brilliant. One thing did cross my mind though: “What about Mel?”

The knight at first didn’t seem to know who it was, but Adia cleared that up, sort of: “Melati of House Kasih, his betrothed – we arrived together”

“Yes, it would be unseemly and suspicious if you only you two show up back in Bristol. Bring her along, keep her safe guardian!” the knight said sternly, though for once he didn’t bark out what he said. Maybe it was simply difficult to not speak in an aggressive tone while in midform?

Adia nodded, but she also looked confused – apparently being called ‘guardian’ was a big deal: “Yes sir, but… sire, I am only a trainee”

Apparently not anymore: “We do not send trainees into the field – and trainees are barred from being issued full blackscale kit, thus, you can’t possibly be a trainee anymore. Congratulations on your promotion”

Ultimately all this meant was that Adia had gotten full access to the armory and the knight had avoided any liability for sending a trainee on a real mission – oh well, time to go home, or so I thought… and yes, I had completely failed to question why they had call Mel my betrothed. I sure has hell hadn’t asked her marry me, but that would first make sense much later.

I met up with Mel and Adia a bit later. Mother had said goodbye to me, and implored me to get back to the Avalon as quickly as possible. I want to say that she looked sad, or scared, as left… but she didn’t – though she did give Adia a pleading look or two, as if to implore her to keep me safe.

The way we were to get back to England was of course by magic, obviously. Though, the only magic part of it was how three bits of paper were enchanted to convince both airport staff and any machine scanning the things that they were real tickets, albeit with very fake names.


	4. Eyes Wide Shut

Arriving at Heathrow was strange. I had been there so many times before, but this time it wasn’t really to go home… hell, Adia had been quietly briefing me and Mel on what to do and things to look out for, Mel having used her Spell ‘O Quiet to make sure that nobody else on the flight heard us – oh and this was the first time I had ever flown first class. It wasn’t nearly as impressive as I had imagined, but I think that was more the imminent threat of hitmen possibly waiting for us in the airport that spoiled the experience. Mel had conversely never flown coach I had also learned.

During the flight I also mused on the various Nohde I had seen at the Tartus Avalon: The scarab Nohde had at first looked really weird and alien but having spent a few days seeing them chat and gossip, knit, or duck out to take a shit made them very human indeed. The same applied for the few dragon Nohde there, especially Mel: She had grown quieter, more afraid, and far clingier over the last few days.

There turned out to be no hitmen at Heathrow, but there was an hour long wait for our luggage – not that we had been able to bring much, but Adia had a briefcase which had turned out to be too heavy to be carry-on, so it had to be checked in. She had been exceedingly cross about this, but had maintained her poise to avoid making a scene. At the time I didn’t know what was in it – but apparently it was lined with some magic nosh that weighed a lot, to prevent it from being magically detected, at the cost of weighing a lot.

Exiting Heathrow, I recalled that we had originally shied away from the London Avalon – it had been ‘compromised’ a couple of days ago. Adia said that magical communication from Tartus to London had confirmed that this wasn’t the case anymore, but she would still scout the entrance before letting us get near.

I didn’t quite catch the name of the tube station we exited from, for Adia kept us in a hurry, but it wasn’t exactly the poshest part of London we soon found ourselves in. Warehouses with heavily locked metal gates and garage doors with at least partially broken windows were the lay of the land, but hey: What better place to hide something you didn’t want others to look into? I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that the three groups of chavs spread around a small parking lot were in fact magically veiled gryphon Nohde guards armed with magically super-charged cattle-prods.

Entering the warehouse with the London Avalon was done quickly, but discreetly.

Now, to describe the London Avalon I must first give a proper description of the Tartus Avalon, simply to make sure that we’re both on the same wavelength here: The Tartus Avalon had been a dusty, run-down warehouse in the meat and fish-packing district, and its insides had looked like a Damascus bazaar under a roof that appeared transparent from the inside, mixed with a refugee camp style tent city. All of that had been crammed together in a structure that looked as if built by the soviets back when they had anything to say in that part of the world. 

The London Avalon was a modern shopping mall that also sold magic stuff. There was neon everywhere, made even worse by magical illusions that you could just as well have told me were holograms, of products, brand logos and shop signs that swirled and danced around on the storefronts, all trying to get your attention – some using naked neon ladies, some using lewd gestures and what amounted to early 90s annoying flashing internet banner ads. Magical ad-block please?

I saw a nail salon, only the posters and signs it had advertised claw, hoof, horn and beak polish, among other things.

…and that’s before mentioning the zoo of different mid-form Nohde roaming around, casually shopping and browsing: African lion-people, who could hands down win any fursuit contest at any furry convention - Mel had once thought it would be fun to go one in the US, something we had both quickly regretted. There were Indian cow-women having tea at a café. They did not have udders I quickly noted, but did hold their tea-cups with their strangely hoof-tipped fingers. There were also panthers, bears and of course a ton of gryphons: half-eagle half-lion magical winged hybrids of some kind. Mel had told me that legend would have that the gryphons came to England with the Romans in the form of lion-Nohde that found themselves able to hybridize with local bird of prey Nohde native to Ireland or Scotland. Well, that was the story, because there were currently no knowledge or documentation of Nohde hybridization being a real thing, nor any signs of any bird of prey Nohde ever having existed in that part of the world.

We quickly moved to what at first looked like a pawn-shop: It had a heavy steel-reinforced door, and its windows looked armored as well, probably with magic to boot. Inside there were claws, feathers and other bits of Nohde for sale, some carved into knick knack and ornaments, some looking disgustingly ‘fresh picked’. 

“Here to buy or sell?” the young bird-lady behind the counter said, looking like something I wanted to put in a Disney movie, or an episode of Bojack Horseman. I had never imaged that I would ever see a bird with lip-gloss, on her beak, but now I had. She looked like such a cheap slag.

“Withdraval” Adia said in a very serious tone, withdrawing a smartphone-sized slab of stone and slamming it on the desk quite demonstratively. I didn’t get a good look of it, but there was something carved into the thing – and the girl just accepted the thing, put it in the till, nodded and then began pushing buttons on her till. 

A light turned on out back, and I could hear someone with a Liverpudlian accent swear briefly – he had apparently been awoken from a cheeky nap, on the job no less. A few minutes later a young-ish bird-man (Judging their age came surprisingly easy to me, yet I can’t for the love of it tell you how I did it) came out with a sack slung rather casually over his shoulder, dropping it next to the bird lady.

Adia put her briefcase up on the desk next to the till and fuck me with a ten-foot golden dildo that was a lot of cash they were stuffing into that briefcase from that sack. The bird-lady cheerfully gave Adia a receipt, which said three hundred thousand British Pounds. Did Adia think we needed to bribe every professor at Bristol University with a new sports car or something?

Leaving, we passed another café where I couldn’t help but hear not that hushed talk about ‘the dragon coup’ – people here knew that something had happened… probably more than we did.

Heading to the exit we were stopped by a group of midform gryphons in somewhat awkward-looking, but very functional, security guard uniforms – their feathers didn’t appear to work with normal uniform cloth, but they were using some kind of magic work-around.

Fuck – they wanted to talk. Adia didn’t, Mel didn’t, and even as I write this I can only remember how I had just seen countless strange and wondrous products in the various store-fronts we had passed, that had mixed up magic and technology to do things that seemed quite impossible. Thus, I was blissfully unaware of just how tense the situation was – we simply didn’t know if the gryphons were in on the coup.

So, as Adia was ‘politely’ escorted off to explain herself, Mel and I looked for something to eat. We found an Indian curry place. Of course, this was magic Indian curry – served by an Indian Nohde cow-person. I say person because it was really difficult at the time for me to tell if a cow Nohde in mid-form was a man or a woman. I hadn’t gotten used to how some mid-form Nohde don’t really show much in sexual dimorphism, and yet I will today swear that I can recognize a female Nohde’s glint in her eyes when she’s in mid-form – funny how that is.

The menu was displayed in the form of off-brand ipads embedded into the tables – very impressive, albeit cheap looking. Not sure how they made sure that the menu image constantly spun around to face whoever was looking at it, especially with two at the table, but Mel brushed that off as simple magic. The food on the menu was divided into three sections, not in accordance to how spicy it was, but based on what forms could eat it: There was food for humans, mid-form and true form.

Mel explained that some of the forms applied certain dietary restrictions: Cow Nohde in true form could only eat plants – like real cows. True form dragon Nohde in turn found living creatures very tasty. Your form would alter your perception of the world accordingly – making that kind of changes not seem weird. It certainly sounded weird. Also, their three-star curries were made specifically for Nohde in mid-form only, since they were so spicy that human forms would – in the words of the warning on the menu: “Our three star curries are alchemically flavor-fortified. Ingesting any of the dishes in human form will result in death-like pain for three days and damage to your teeth and bowels”

The curry they made for humans – what me and Mel got – was quite spicy by their own right, and plenty tasty. Adia arrived about half-way through our meal, looking notably calmer than when she had been escorted away by the gryphon guards. They simply wanted to be sure that Adia understood just how much money she had withdrawn, and wanted to be sure that what she intended to spend it on was above board – no sense in drawing attention to the magical community by spending money from it recklessly, civil war or not.

Adia also noted that the gryphons had ensured her that the Nohde and minions part of the dragon coup had withdrawn their presence from England – then again, all of Englands representatives for the dragon council had been either captured or killed in Prague, at least according to what the Gryphons knew. Adia had chosen not fill them in on the Nohde me and Adia had freed – why she had chosen such, she did not explain, but I figured it was to avoid having that information reach the rebels.

Leaving the curry place I only managed to catch a few fleeting glimpses of other Nohde shops. This wasn’t some Harry Potter bullshit where magic and modern technology didn’t work together – I saw a hardware store that sold magically rechargeable batteries! At the time I could only think how handy that would be for my X-bone controllers. Sadly, Adia gave us no time to shop around.

We arrived on campus in Bristol later in the evening. I was tired, hungry, and worn out from all the running around Adia had put us through – she was apparently quite certain that we had been followed, even though we never found anyone via the magical traps or ambushes Adia set up.

I wanted to go crash in my dorm room, but Adia wouldn’t let me anywhere near that: “It’s too obvious a security risk”

Mel suggested we stay the night at her place, her living off-campus: “My place is warded – I haven’t gotten any messages of breaches”

Apparently Mel’s apparent had magical security wards set up that would send her a text message if someone tried to break in, or magically scry into the flat. Adia still wouldn’t let us go there…

This of course led to a somewhat heated discussion between me and Adia on what she was expecting us to do: It was almost nine in the evening on a windy Tuesday. There wouldn’t be any professors out and about – and we needed the professor I had in material science class, who no doubt had gone home for the day. Maybe checking to see if there was someone over at admin who could give us an address if we asked nice would be an idea?

Adia said that doing so would be useless – the last clerk would have gone home a long time ago. This struck me as odd, since Adia sounded far too sure of that for an out-of-towner. Mel quickly noted that Adia had been spying on me for quite a while as part of her training, something her and Adia had apparently talked about back in Tarsus while doing small-talk about me.

Looking around a bit to check that nobody was in sight – and we were quite alone in the parking lot we were lounging around in – Mel asked me the name of the professor. Giving her that name, Mel began casting a spell.

A note on magic and spell-casting: It generally looked really underwhelming. Mel was waving her hands around, making a few circular motions – but there was nothing to see, though I would later learn that as a shadow my eyes were closed to that kind of phenomena. I would have to be awakened first. Some flavors of magic were visible to normies, but not very much.

The spell Mel had cast gave her the location of my professor. With that we quickly homed in on his off-campus apartment, via a cabbie who quickly got really tired of Mel and Adia telling him if he should turn left or right at the next intersection – cabbies like to know where exactly they’re going. 

At the right place, which we confirmed via the name on the letterbox, Adia quickly strode up to the door and knocked firmly. The lights inside the house were on, but it was almost ten. Mel assured me that Adia knew what she was doing.

Now, I had last seen this particular professor back during my first semester when he had taught introductory material science, so about a year and a half ago, but that had always been on-campus and the professor had been in his usual jeans and buttoned up shirt.

As he opened the door, we got an eyeful of the fifty-something man in a stained wifebeater and no pants, looking like Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances. No beer hat though. He didn’t exactly look keen to entertain guests at this time of night.

Adia very quickly introduced herself, carrying herself quite professionally: “…the reason we’re here is that I represent an organization that shall remain nameless. We wish to hire you to examine this bullet and these bullet fragments and tell us exactly what they’re made of, but we need this information now, not in three weeks”

Before the good professor could object or say that his schedule is full right now, Adia flashed him the contents of her briefcase: “In this are three-hundred thousand non-sequential ten pound notes. This is what we’re offering, provided that you can deliver results before dawn”

Yes that was a lot of money. Like, cheesy eighties action movie style with a briefcase full of cash style of money. I only caught a fleeting glance of the suitcase content, but it sure looked legit. The expression of the professor also changed, though after Adia closed the suitcase he looked more at me: “Fred, what have you gotten in to?”

“Other way around sir – one of these bullets got into him. I represent an organization that is quite keen on finding out where they were made so the makers can be brought to justice. These are not store-bought bullets. Under a microscope there are tiny dark specs or grains the surface. We need all of this identified, no questions asked” Adia quickly noted, bringing things back on topic.

Ten minutes later, the professor – now clothed – drove all of us back to campus, to the mechanical engineering department’s foundry. He had tried to small talk a bit during the drive, inquire into what I had gotten into, but Adia and Mel both ensured that I didn’t say much and that the professor didn’t learn anything he wasn’t supposed to know.

It wasn’t a huge foundry, but there was a nice big induction smelter there for melting stuff down and casting fun things for experiments and testing new alloys at the university foundry at the mechanical engineering faculty buildings.

The device we needed the professor to use was some kind of spectrum analyzer. I do not recall the exact name of it – which really is quite embarrassing since I was supposed to be a student there - but the gist was that you took a small one inch in diameter disc, about eight of an inch thick, put it in the machine, which then zapped it or something, and then it had a sniff at what metal vapors the zap tore lose. This would then be analyzed and give you a nice readout of the material makeup of what was being tested. It was great for checking the exact chemical makeup of a new alloy for example.

To make the test-disc Adia and the professor quickly melted down a handful of the bullet shards, poured it into a thoroughly cleaned mold, and once cold stuffed it into the machine.

“Ok, so we have mostly copper in here, some traces of silicate, and a fair bit of carbon and hydrogen” the professor noted after the final readout was ready, which took very little time.

“hydro-carbons in the bullet? As in organic material?” Mel pointed out – that was Mel, the chemistry student, rearing her head for once.

The professor couldn’t say what the organic material was, but he did note that it was highly irregular, since molten metals had a funny habit of destroying anything organic in them, which should only leave behind carbon, not intact hydrocarbons, though what he’d been told about the microscope examinations of the material did support the notion that it was organic material.

To examine the nature of the hydrocarbons – the black grains in the bullets – the professor brought us over to a laboratory where the university had what looked like a cargo container with some hatches in it. It was a dirty great microscope of some kind, though its exact name and function wasn’t introduced to us. The professor put the bullet into it, turned the machine on and then we sat and waited for about half an hour.

Once the time was up, the professor turned on a nearby computer and pulled up an image that had apparently come from the machine: It wasn’t an electron microscope image, but it was very close to it. It was also in color and was a close-up of one of the grains at a level of magnification that I dared not ponder.

The image showed a fibrous structure between metal grains – like a closeup of some kind of tissue. I have seen enough CSI shows to recognize that much, though I couldn’t tell what kind of tissue it was.

“Remarkable – it seems entirely undamaged by being cast into bullets” my professor said, adding that if they he had access to some of the bio-labs they could probably get a sample of the material for DNA testing.

Adia refused to have this done, instead inquiring into what the material was, not who or what it was from.

“Hmm, well it’s not bone – wrong chemical composition back at the scanner, but the image… it looks a bit like bone. Hold on, let me look a few things up” the professor said, booting up some software I recognized as a material science database.

Twenty minutes of sifting through images of organic materials in the database we finally found what the image looked like the most: beta-karotin fiber bundles, the material that makes up scales, hair, horns and claws.

Both Adia and Mel became very agitated when the possibility of the mystery material being claws or nails was aired. Adia asked very firmly if he was sure it might be claws. He said: “You can’t reconstruct the granules, but its keratin, that much I am sure of – short of a DNA test, which I’m not sure we can do because of the size of the grains, then this is as good as it gets”

Snapping to attention, Adia nodded and handed him the suitcase: “In that case, thank you. In this you will also find the card of an investment company that will accept the money and invest it for you in such a way that you will not get into trouble with the tax authorities”

The second she had finished that line, Adia turned and walked out, Mel grabbing me and pulling me along.

I never did learn what the professor used the money for, but he wasn’t working at the university by the time I returned for classes after the summer.

Outside again, it struck me just how tired I was. It was almost four in the morning. Once the cab arrived I fell asleep.

I was woken up at Heathrow at “Bugger me that can’t be right” in the morning. Apparently Adia had sent some magical communication to the Tarsus Avalon and gotten new marching orders for the three of: Go to Singapore and lay low.

At that time I was too tired to object or question what we were to do in Singapore. Mel later told me that I just said “Oh that’s nice – then we can meet your parents Mel”

This much was true: Mel’s parents did live and work in Singapore, but after I had slept for a couple of hours on a bench I was told that visiting mel’s mother and father wasn’t the purpose of our mission: The professor had all but confirmed that the granules in the bullets were powdered dragon-claws.

I did recall having been told that dragon claws and other such Nohde-bits were the only things that could truly effectively kill a Nohde – which had been why my mother had had so much trouble with the magic used to heal her. The problem was that refining and ‘concentrating’ such powders would require a lot of dragon-claws, and the council usually kept track of where the claws of dead dragons are located and who owned them – not unlike a government having a firearms registry.

This had apparently left only one place where a large cache of dragon-claws could be found, with there being too much oversight: At the pacific dragon ossuary.

Later on the flight Mel explained the place to me: It was a location several hundred miles from any settled island a bit south-east of Japan and east of Indonesia, where dragon Nohde who die in true form are buried at sea – basically wrapped in silks and weighed down with some symbolic items for the burial ceremony. It was apparently tradition among dragon Nohde to assume their true form and die in that, so that you did not die wearing a lie.

Of course, the ocean depth at that point was somewhere between “Human technology cannot build a submarine that can handle that kind of depths” and “No you can’t go there via magic either”

If the rebels had found a way to raid the ossuary for claws… well, that they had found a way to make them into bullets would just be showing off, if that was the case. We had thus been dispatched to confirm if the ossuary was safe, and if not then to shut down the operation there.

In retrospect I really should have asked just how the three of us were supposed to do that – but at “Bugger me its five in the morning” you don’t ask that kind of questions.


	5. Unearthing Grim Truths

On the trip I learned that there actually were direct flights from London to Shanghai. Over the course of the trip I also learned that such a trip took a very long time, which really sucked when you were on economy class – getting any amount of sleep on the flight was a pain, but the flight took long enough that you could sleep twice during it.

It was strange: I never did figure out if we had flown east or west around the world to get to Singapore – but there was no doubt when it was announced that were on approach to land: The first language that the “we are now on approach to…” announcement was spoken in, was in some asian language I didn’t understand.

Oh yes, language: Mel had always spoken flawless English – and the closest I knew to a foreign language was speaking English since I’m Danish, so almost all the signs, all the adverts, all the labels on things, all the price tags… ya ok, in the airport there was a lot of English signs, but that declined very rapidly once we entered into what I could only assume was Shanghai proper, or whatever you called it.

To be honest, then describing Shanghai doesn’t really work. Go look up a video on youtube, or take a trip there yourself. It is unique, in a nice asian way – but with a lot of western influence. Mind you, I never got that much time to check out the sites, just like back at the London Avalon, but this wasn’t some secret magic thing – this was just another bloody country on the other side of the world!

Adia got us what turned out to be a Chinese Über-knockoff to drive us to somewhere outside the city. Also fuck me the driver was able to move us around quickly, despite the traffic in the city. Was he a rally driver or something? Either way: At first I thought we were going to a gated community – turned out it was just a single massive walled estate, built in the best style of “rich Asians who want something that looks like a French chateau to live in” you could imagine. I mean, I’ve been to France several times, I’ve seen the chateaus – both ones still in use and ones that were just ruins. This fit the bill, though the local jungle-looking fauna sure as hell wasn’t what you’d see in French vineyards. Think mango trees instead of grapes.

As we approached Mel began pulling some clothes out of her luggage. I hadn’t thought of it up until that point, but when we got up to the mansion Mel had somehow – without even using magic – put on a very nice pants suit.

I could not help feeling woefully underdressed in my day old T-shirt and jeans that I had slept in. Adia didn’t appear phased at all. It had started raining during our drive, and the short forty feet from the car to the door was a muddy mess.

Inside, my thoughts of attire became more focused on my footwear. My sneakers hadn’t changed since I had gotten shot back in Prague, they even had a few bloodstains on them still. I felt really bad as I walked into the very nice polished marble floor – but that was instantly whisked away when I saw that what little dirt and mud I was leaving behind via my footprints, was vanishing into quickly fading sparkles. Magic floor cleaning. Good grief.

Ok, Mel’s parents. We were introduced, and they seemed nice enough, at the time. I won’t bother spelling out their names here – they later asked not to be identified in this, and I respect that even if turned out to be cunts. They looked very rich and very asian, which as a westerner on his very first visit to the far east is about as well as it is possible for me to describe them.

Me and Mel had talked about meeting her parents – she had never seemed that keen, arguing that they were very strict. The way Mel stood with her head bowed, speaking to them in their native language in a very quiet tone confirmed this very quickly. Having to describe my interactions with the three makes me realize just how limited my vocabulary is when it comes to asian etiquette, because it was blatantly obvious that I had no clue what kind of family traditions I had been thrust into. Anyway: There wasn’t really time to just sit down and explain everything to me. Well, sort of.

Adia disappeared off with some of the servants, or guards. I couldn’t really tell, and they all looked like the sort who’d appear in a Yakuza game. That was the last I saw of her for quite a while.

Mel ushered me into a lounge of some kind where I was seated in a very nice couch in front of a small glass table, with Mel’s parents sitting down across me. The whole room was decorated with a very... glass... style. The shelves were black metal rods with glass panels, with glass knick knack. The chandelier was glass, the tea pot that Mel brought in was glass. The tea-cups were glass, which of course is heresy and an affront to good tea etiquette – but ok, this was the glass room.

With tea poured for everyone, the questions began. Mel just stood next to her parents, her face stiff and blank – was she under a spell? Back home she would have draped herself over me and started fiddling with my hair at this point, even the few times she had met my mother.

The questions themselves were surprisingly innocent, at first anyway. How are things going with Mel? Just fine. How are your studies going? It was difficult, but I was keeping up – though that question did make me wonder if all this would be over before September when the next semester started.

The chit chat was strangely innocent. There were no questions about anything Nohde – it was all about mundane, mortal topics. How was England at this time of year and stuff. The only thing they didn’t ask about was the weather.

It got to a point where I was getting annoyed: Where they ignoring all the chaos in the magical world on purpose? Or... and then the other shoe dropped: They didn’t know that I was not really a shadow anymore.

“Look, this is very nice and all – and I am very thankful for your hospitality, but we’ve just flown really far and I’m guessing Adia is setting things up with your people. We’re on a bit of an important mission, sort of, for the council guardians holed up in the Tartus Avalon – hasn’t Mel told you?” I said.

The look on their faces. I could probably had dropped my trousers and taken a grand old steaming shit on their glass table – it would have shocked them just the same, maybe.

Mel’s expression was difficult to read: There were elements of relief, an expression I knew well: She had the same look when she got news of having passed tough exams. There also elements of dread. She clearly wasn’t sure how her parents would react to all this – that I wasn’t quite a shadow anymore, that we were involved with the council guardians and knights and whatnot...

Mel’s parents maintained a stiff upper lip – though Mel’s mother’s lower lip did tighten into an ever so slightly sour look. Words followed in their native language – it was a series of short questions by Mel’s mother, followed by a series of single syllable answers from Mel, probably a bunch of yes and no replies. Mel’s father then had some longer questions, having looked pensive while Mel’s mother had spoken – neither of them turned to face Mel for their questions to her.

Mel’s reply to her father’s question was longer, and once done her parents both nodded ever so slightly.

I’m not sure if they used telepathy or something, but Mel suddenly seemed to get the idea that ushering me to into another room and leaving me there, then returning me to her parents was the correct thing to do.

Like everything else they were saying I had no clue what they were talking about – but they weren’t quiet about it. The shouting lasted quite a while, with pauses where I could hear Mel say things, followed by more shouting by her parents. What a lovely family dynamic.

I honestly wasn’t checking the time, but at one point I couldn’t take it anymore. I burst into the glass lounge.

Mel was sitting where I had sat, her mascara running, her eyes full of tears. Her parents were looming over her, arms raised as they berated her.

For a brief moment I forgot that all three of them were in fact dragons. For a brief moment I just wanted to protect Mel – so I got between the lot and shouted: “Enough!”

Now, I have I read the stories of more than one westerner who lived in Japan, China, Korea and even Singapore – trying to get a feel for how I would end up experiencing going there, in anticipation of meeting Mel’s parents. In one of these stories, that of a black American teacher who taught English in Japan, I had read of a thing the author had dubbed ‘gaijin smash’ – the way in which a westerner could crash through the ‘calm’ enforced by the Asian honor culture, basically forcing Asians to comply with your commands through the force of their not wanting to cause a scene and get singled out for standing up to you. I honestly still don’t know if that’s a purely Japanese thing, but at the time then it looked to me as if that was what I had managed to achieve between Mel and her parents.

Mel gave me a truly incredulous look, while her parents abided and took a step back. Their expressions were stern, but they were acquiescing – so I didn’t question the result.

A bit more moonspeak followed from her parents, but it wasn’t in a nearly as angry tone – though it might have been spiteful, but as Mel got up, leaning on me, she sounded defiant as she replied. I had no clue what she said, but the way she was finishing her senses with spiteful upturns of her face, and her angry expressions told me all I need to know.

That somehow ended everything, and me and Mel were given leave to go freshen up. Upstairs, in what I identified as Mel’s room based on the amount of K-pop boyband posters and designer high-heeled sandals, Mel apparently decided to thank for saving her from her parents in a little more than words – namely torrid oral sex. I didn’t complain. We took a shower together afterwards.

Once out of that she had fresh clothes read for me. In retrospect I really should have asked how the hell they had clothes my size ready for me, because it sure wasn’t something that would have fit on her parents.

Dinner was served after that – which made me acutely aware of how utterly fucked up my sense of time was. My biological clock was saying lunch-time. Oh this was going to turn into some serious jet-lag.

The food itself was amazing. Indonesian cooking, lots of fish, bits of things that sort of looked and tasted like sushi – but not in any way I had ever tried. While eating very little was said, which was a little odd. Adia didn’t dine with us, but I assume that she got something to eat elsewhere.

After dinner we met up with Adia, who said that it was time to leave – I had at least hoped to get some sleep before we headed out to the dragon boneyard, but I didn’t get a say in the matter. Mel’s parents had us flown to a small private airstrip via their personal helicopter. The helicopter ride was a lot less impressive than I had hoped, namely because it was pitch black. The same basically applied to the small company jet ride to the point in the ocean where the graveyard was located.

As the pilot notified us over the intercom that we were the there and that he had slowed to ‘drop speed’, I realized that we weren’t landing on anything. Adia just slid open the door and jumped out, no parachute.

I was given a parachute – something I had never used, while Mel gave me a peck on the cheek and said that she’d catch me either way... then she pushed me out of the door…

Having never done any kind of parachute jumping, freefall training or anything like that, I of course screamed like a little girl as I plummeted trough a dark night-time sky towards a similarly pitch-black ocean. This was so not what I had signed up for – though, to be honest then I hadn’t really signed anything with regards to this.

My terror was quickly distracted, as Mel swooped in and caught me in her giant claws, which really wasn’t that reassuring.

Mel brought me down next to Adia, who was also in her full true dragon form, who was providing the only source of light I could see: She was casting a spell.

“Damnit, no reply – we have to go down there” Adia cursed a few moments after casting her spell.

Apparently, the spell she had worked was a communication spell – and no reply was bad news. This of course made me ask why that spell simply hadn’t been cast back in Tarsus, or London, but apparently then the usurpers had seized control of some magic gizmos that allowed for global magical communication, cutting off and isolating all council loyalists, or at ‘best’ simply eavesdropping and monitoring all magical dragon Nohde communications.

“Mel, prepare a deep bubble – and hand Fred over, I have something for him” Adia said, her voice resonating in my head as if spoken through ear-phones embedded in my skull.

The hand-over was a bit awkward, but Adia got hold of me none the less. She then ‘handed’ me a gun – a plain but clean-looking Glock: “It is loaded with our one dragon-killing bullet – we can’t use the gun while in these forms, but you can – and I know you’re a good shot”

Realising that it was the sort-of magic bullet that had been taken from my leg that had been put into a new cartridge and loaded into the gun was weird – but at that moment I was more concerned about why Adia felt the need to arm me: “You think I’ll need it? Also, guns don’t work underwater”

“I hope not – but if there are usurpers down at the temple, then you might need it and it’ll be dry there” Adia explained, adding that the first bullet was the dragon killer, the rest were ordinary rounds. I checked the magazine, and indeed the first bullet did have a slightly darker shade of copper than the rest.

I didn’t want to point out that I was only really accustomed to using Olympic-grade target shooting rifles – not real weapons. At least the safety was in roughly the same place – I made sure it was on.

The gun weighed a lot more than I was used to – or maybe it was just the nerves? I can’t stress enough how much I didn’t want to shoot anyone at that point.

Mel’s spell made water shy away from us, as we floated down into the water. Once we were deep enough, we were basically encased in a very large magic bubble that held the water back and made enough space for the two dragons to circle around in. Adia produced magic that lit up the waters around us and somehow kept the air fresh, allowing us to see the fish and other shadows that wiggled around just beyond the magical barrier.

The descent was surprisingly quick – I still don’t know how deep we went, but we reached the bottom of the ocean! The waters around us were pitch black, with only the lights that dragon-Adia were conjuring to show us what we were doing.

At one point Adia suddenly dimmed her lights and warned us: “Get ready”

A new light, dim and flickering, grew from her mouth – she was somehow building up a ball of lightning, her body coiling up as if to lunge out and strike.

If Mel and Adia had spoken at this point, to coordinate their attack, then they weren’t letting me in on their plans. All I know is that suddenly Mel pushed her bubble up next to what appeared to be a bubble conjured by someone else.

The two bubbles merged, and Adia zipped through, a continuous thundercrack roaring through my ears.

This was when the screaming began – the kind of absolutely terrified, agonizing pain screams that you would make if your arm suddenly got chopped off, or if you and your buddies got a few legs and arms turned into charred toothpicks by a gout of dragon lightning.

After the first few seconds of screams we started to hear return fire. Mel rushed into the breach, revealing to me the extent of the carnage here, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

I held on tight to my handgun, and wished that I had some body-armor. I didn’t know of the protective spells Mel had put on me. It also wasn’t easy to duck when you’re knee-deep in soggy ocean bottom sand.

Between gun fire at us, and Adia and Mel ‘breathing’ lightning at the people down on the ocean floor among piles and piles of giant bits of dragon bone, with it all taking place in a ‘dome’ under dark water at who knows how deep... this was a scene that I found oddly familiar, and yet of course completely alien: This looked and sounded like something out of a Hollywood movie, and not the sort that had happy endings.

It might sound a bit crass, but I recall having heard of similar stories from the people who witnessed the 9/11 world trade centre attacks – that it seemed all the more ‘real’ because it looked just like something out of a movie. This made it surprisingly easy to shoot back, though I had to look around first to spot anyone who didn’t quite look human, to use my nohde-killer bullet on. I recall that it was a dark-furred Nohde, probably one of the Russian were-bears.

It was at this point that I saw Mel twitch mid-flight and drop to the ground. Who would have thought that a giant dragon was easy to shoot down? Oh, she was still alive, for as we were surrounded Mel was somehow forced to ‘shrink’ to her mid-form. In this form her wounds were all the more obvious, but like mother she didn’t seem as much hurt as just inconvenienced and slowed down.

I couldn’t see Adia anywhere, but there were no more lightning breath thunderclaps.

Next up I don’t quite know what happened – because someone went ahead and knocked me out, somehow. I never did figure out how, but the amount of sand in my hair when I woke up might point towards it having been a kick, though it could also have been a spell with me falling over.

Oh, and I had a black bag over my head, and I was in a speed boat somewhere, back on the surface. I was in so much trouble.


	6. Drowning in a Sea of Lies

The black bag over my head was eventually removed. I was somewhere among tropical islands, so probably still somewhere around Indonesia or Malaysia. The sky looked weird – the clouds weren’t moving right, as if something big and invisible was obstructing them. What? You want me to describe generic tropical islands? They had palm trees. Probably some ferns – and the air humidity was murder.

For fairly obvious reasons I didn’t feel that inclined to talk to my captors. I was part of a council mission and I had been captured by the usurpers – I was fucking terrified, but... why capture me? Weren’t these jokers more in the business of killing off council people? No, hold on. They had captured all those people in the trucks back in Prague. What had the plan been with them? Ransom? Brainwashing? Black market organ trade? Human trafficking for the sex trade? Nah, too many grannies for that.

Looking around, which wasn’t easy when you’re cuffed behind your back and your legs were tied – and everything was tied to a thing in the boat to prevent me from jumping into the water – I could see that we were accompanied by two other speed boats. Damn those things were bouncy – this wasn’t smooth sailing.

I was quite hungry and thirsty by the time we arrived at what looked like some kind of modern and fairly ugly island fortress: Sharp but naked concrete features, as if someone had ‘bunkered’ all over the place and they had just melded into each other. The boat I was in was sailed into a boat garage – I call it that because a door did close behind us. Submarine pen? Dock?

Armed Indonesian or Malay looking types, who spoke surprisingly good albeit heavily accented English, ordered me to follow them. Prison camp? Mad wizard’s laboratory? Political re-education? I feared the worst.

Turned out that they took me to a cripple’s office – and left me there – no longer in chains.

Ok, the cripple. Aside from the wheelchair, then two words to describe him very quickly would be gay and European. He certainly didn’t look Asian, and he had that very effeminate and fabulous streak going in his designer turtleneck and skinny jeans. Not really camp, more along the half-way between that dead Apple guy and that gay British ex-Breitbart editor.

Basically, he had Bond villain written all over him. I couldn’t see any trapdoors to the laser shark pit. 

Mind you, this impression lasted all of about twelve seconds, because when he started talking it wasn’t anything about trying to intimidate me, or gloat over my capture, or trying to interrogate me:

“So Fred – what exactly do you think your mother does for a living? Would you like to know the truth?” he asked me.

His voice was almost offensively stereotypical – fruity gay, though with an obvious Slavic accent - maybe at the very least east-German sounding but possibly Russian or Belarusian. Made me wonder if it was all an act. Oh, and the question? Caught me off guard completely, I mean, who asks that kind of stuff?  
Pointing me towards a ludicrously huge flat-screen T, which was embedded in the far wall of his surprisingly spacious and well-lit office, he wheeled around me. He bid me have a seat one of his very comfy leather recliners. What kind of dirt did he have on mom?

While poking around on his smartphone, he introduced himself: “My name is Piotr by the way. Has your mother and her friends told you of me?”

I couldn’t say that they had.

Piotr explained that he had ordered me brought to him to – namely because he wanted to show me something, assuring me repeatedly that he had no intentions of harming me – which I of course didn’t believe a word of.

I spitefully noted that if it was anything other than proving to me that Mel and Adia were safe, then I didn’t want to hear it. I knew I was fucked, or at least that’s what I thought at the time, so I at least wanted Mel and Adia to be ok.

At first this seemed to genuinely take Piotr by surprise, though it also seemed to sadden him: “Did they really bring you that much into the light?”

I had no clue what he meant – and stressed that I just wanted to know if Mel and Adia were safe, in less kind but more creative terms.

“Really? And why is that?” he simply asked. I answered in kind that I loved Mel and considered Adia a friend who had saved my life, so why shouldn’t I worry about them?

He laughed. The crippled bastard laughed – swinging around in his wheelchair, which revealed that his legs were but withered twigs with shoes on, fancy designer jeans or not.

Once he was done laughed, Piotr’s demeanour changed a little – he stopped toying around, even apologizing: “I see. Then you must forgive me. My plans never really included shadows, so you should never have been involved in any of this. And indeed, your girlfriend and guardian are both alive and receiving care, albeit while in restraints” and then he pulled up some images from his phone and showed me Mel and Adia via what looked like CCTV feeds.

While he did sound sincere, then his apology still rang hollow to me – mainly because I knew damn well that his ‘all this’ involved my mother getting shot, but also because while the images of Mel and Adia getting healed were reassuring, then they were clearly under some kind of magical restraints. They were captives. 

To this he stressed that I only thought that way because I hadn’t been told everything – and then he offered me to put all the cards on the table, including what the council and their knights had not told me.

Conventional wisdom held that when a Bond villain offers to tell you his whole plan it’s only because he’ll kill you right afterwards.

“Do I have a choice in the matter?” I asked, doubting that I would get an honest answer.

Poitr shrugged: “I guess not – but if you see what I have to show you with an open mind, then I think you’ll reconsider your stance on me and this whole rebellion”

Again, I protested – but not for the same reason. I was simply tired of being bossed around. A week ago I had been the lord of my own life, but now? I had been shot at, I had been shot, I had been dragged half-ways across the world and then shot at some more – and now captured. I was so done being toyed around with and used.

My anger amused Piotr, but at the same time he seemed to sympathize: “Fred, that’s why I offered to show you everything – I didn’t order it, though I will if you refuse, because I think you deserve to know the truth even if you do not want to hear it”

“Then it’s not much a choice, is it?” I shot back.

Spinning his wheelchair around and pointing a remote at the big TV in the wall, Piotr replied: “You say that – but you have no idea how much you’ve been used already”

The TV turned on to reveal a computer desktop. The background picture was a big pile of kittens in large tea-cups and the icons on the desktop revealed Piotr’s gaming habits to include a lot of puzzle games. Filthy casual.

Piotr pulled up footage onto the TV that had been recorded on a smartphone that had been half-hidden inside someone’s jacket, if judging by how it was shaking around and angled.

The scene was that of a castle hall – like, a medieval castle with all the finery, the wall carpets with various heraldry, a giant table and a bunch of people around it that looked very important.

I recognized one of the people – the old granny who got shot in the head back in Praque.

Now, the video was paused to begin with, while Piotr explained a few things: “This is a secret recording from a dragon council session several years ago. I’m the young man on the left in the yellow shirt”

As the video played, it became obvious that the young Piotr in the video was presenting something to the council. There were documents being passed around, and a portable beamer was showing a PowerPoint up on a portable screen. You couldn’t make out what the PowerPoint was about, but the young Piotr was angry and gesturing quite firmly, with another young man standing next to him and nodding often. He was talking about permits for sorcerous enlightenment and why him and his partner’s petition had been denied, also citing many others that had been denied. Apparently, his issue was that the council were denying homosexual dragon Nohde permission to learn magic – that was at least what Piotr told me.

Suddenly some of the guards standing in background surged in and grabbed the two. Piotr paused the video: “Tell me, what have you been told about Nohde magic?”

I couldn’t say much, but he followed up with asking if I knew about how the council controlled who got to learn magic or not. This I did know.

What I didn’t know was that apparently then magic was really handy for Nohde as a tool to maintain their secret identities – in fact Piotr put it quite bluntly: “...so without magic all you really have as Nohde is a very dangerous secret and very few ways of hiding it other than becoming a shut-in or living far away from civilization”

This made sense, after a fashion – Mel had used magic many times to check if we weren’t being watched. That kind of magic would make a lot of sense for anyone who needed to shapeshift in public, or otherwise hide any magic on-goings.

“That’s how the council retains its power: Through control of who gets to learn magic, because we’re all basically doomed to the shadows if we do not have access to magic. If a Nohde is pregnant she cannot shapeshift, but if she is human throughout that pregnancy her child will be born a shadow... like you” Piotr explained, sounding very upset about all that.

Then it hit me: If a pregnant Nohde woman was to function even minimally in society, then magic became quite necessary – especially since Mel had let slip that you also needed magic to ‘bring a shadow back into the light’ - that made control of who got to learn magic a kind of population control.

“For as long as anyone can remember the dragons have been ruled by an aristocracy of powerful sorcerers. They controlled who effectively got to pass on their powers and abilities. Now, with that in mind... do you want to know exactly what you mother does for the council?” Piotr said, his question dripping with venom.

It wasn’t difficult for me to figure out that I probably wouldn’t like what he had to show me – but this new revelation about the nature of the council’s power meant that I just had to know.

Piotr pointed his remote at the big telly and clicked a few buttons.

The video didn’t resume playing instantly – instead it zoomed in, first of all revealing that the video must have originally been shot in a ludicrous resolution or it was probably just magic, but it also revealed the face of one of the enforcers that had grabbed the young Piotr. Yup, that looked like mum from her old photos. Lovely.

Unpausing the video, the young Piotr and his boyfriend were shuffled around so they were up against a wall – and then that same old granny who had gotten shot in Praque pointed her jewelled walking stick at the boyfriend and zapped him with what looked like a thunderbolt. It certainly sounded like it – and the recording blurred momentarily with static.

Once the video came back into focus the boyfriend wasn’t there anymore – but it did look like someone had blown up a few vats of red curry in that end of the room. Blood and tiny blurry bits of nosh was dripping from the ceiling, and the wall carpets were positively soaked in blood.

The young Piotr was next on the chopping block, though there the little old said a few things first in German. Piotr switched on subtitles: “Piotr Vlademkin, the decadence and abominable lifestyle you have presented to this council sicken us. Only by your bloodline do we not simply execute you, that you might redeem yourself in our eyes at a later date”

Piotr stopped the video: “In their mercy they just took away the use of my legs with magic – I can’t even fly if I shift into my true form. That was their punishment to me for asking to learn magic”

I remember nodding. Provided that what Piotr had shown me here was true, of which I was still a little sceptical, then masterminding a revolution did make sense – but again, that all required that what he had shown me was true and not just a bit of movie magic.

Piotr was surprisingly understanding of my scepticism: “I understand – in fact, I would encourage you to try to verify my story once you return to your mother, after you’ve delivered my message”

To say that I was just a little surprised at him saying that he would release me was an understatement, but that had apparently been his plan all along: He needed me to bring a message to the remaining dragon council, namely an offer for the remaining council and their loyalists to surrender peacefully.

Lunch was brought in.

We spoke some more, during which I learned that the dragon council has been populated by members from the same five or six families for centuries. The most recent change in the line-up was after the 1928 stock market crash when one of the then council families lost most of their wealth and the high council decreed that Nohde weren’t to have more than 10% of their family assets in stock or bonds. Whether they still obeyed that rule was unknown, but it was on the books. Basically, the same five families had ruled all dragon Nohde for about a century, with the elections simply being shams since you have to be approved by the current council in order to run for a seat, and they only approved people from their inner circle of families. It was basically a magical dragon mafia.

Ultimately Piotr told me a lot very damning things about the council, about me – but quite a few of these were so far out that I just couldn’t believe them, though I did take notes on my phone and promised that I would investigate the claims after all this was over. I should note that he gave me plenty of links and copies of documents for my smartphone to prove his claims – he was quite aware that he had to prove everything he said. 

Later in the afternoon Piotr told me that Mel was healed and ready to travel. We were to be sent directly to castle Feuerstein somewhere in Germany once we were at the Singapore Avalon – the deal was that after Piotr had confirmed that I had delivered that message, then he would release Adia, even help her back to Tarsus if she wanted to. I found this offer quite reasonable.

With all of that out of the way I should add that in retrospect, Piotr had quite artfully danced around every attempt from me to ask about the dragon-claw bullets. He never explained anything about them, but I never felt that he dodged my questions. If nothing else, then Piotr had a way with words, that much was for certain.

In order to get to the Singapore Avalon, I was black-bagged once more. Sometime later the bag came off. I was in a van, next to Mel – who looked very confused and frightened – and then we were ushered out of the van, which then drove off at speed. She had apparently been both black-bagged and gagged.

It took a few moments before Mel caught up with reality – she just stood and blinked a bit as we stood on a reasonably busy street in Singapore. The neon-lights from the street level shops, the massive ad-screens up on the side of the high-rises – this was the first time I really got to see Singapore without being mid-run to get somewhere. It looked amazing, but of course I did not get any time to really look into things... 

Mel jumped at me, hugging me tightly, and spoke something I didn’t understand in her native tongue – but how she said it, the soft but hurried words, the tone – she was relieved, she was happy, she was crying, she was scared.

After a minute or so she finally eased her grip and started asking questions in English, namely if I was ok and how and why we were released. I explained the nature of the bargain I had struck, and that Adia was still a prisoner.

At first Mel seemed very relieved and happy that all we had to do was deliver a message – but when I explained that we had to deliver it at castle Feuerstein she turned white as a sheet: “No, we can’t go there – not with a message from an outcaste! We should go straight to my parents”

“What happened to ‘dont shoot the messenger’ – we’re doing this under duress remember?” I replied, not exactly feeling all that much pressure, but then Mel explained that Feuerstein was where the dragon council presided, and that they absolutely hated hearing anything that would displease them. The way she put it, then there was usually a very heavy vetting of what petitions and messages that were allowed to be officially delivered to the council.

The irony, when Mel explained that it was usually the council members themselves that took part in that vetting process, didn’t escape me, though Mel didn’t really appear to see how grotesque, corrupt and self-serving the political process she described was.

“Mel, you do realize that what you just described only legitimizes Piotr’s rebellion?” I said, hoping that Mel would be reasonable. From her point of view, trying to just survive all of this, she felt quite reasonable. 

I showed her the video that Piotr had showed me – he had put it on my smartphone for that specific purpose: to show it and reveal the truth of the council’s tyranny to others.

Mel’s reaction was... difficult to describe. It reminded me of the first time we had gone to try some local Thai food in Bristol: A restrained smile, because she didn’t want to insult anyone, but in truth she thought it had been absolutely awful. Was she that afraid of the council? Or was it something else?

“Sweetheart, why are you so scared of them? The rebels already seem to have the upper hand” I asked, honestly doubtful that I would get a real answer.

At first she looked around to see where we were – then she dragged me into the large building we were in front of, a big industrial laundry company. Well, that’s what the sign said out of in front – it was an Avalon.

The Singapore Avalon was – well... as a western tourist, I can only really say ‘asian’ – very asian, because at the time I didn’t understand the nuances of Malay, Indonesian and whatnot cultures. Again, there wasn’t time to play tourists: We were on the clock, which a text message from Piotr reminded me of: They would open up the magical gate network for us for sixty seconds – but only sixty seconds.

This was all new things for me, though apparently gates worked more or less just as you would expect: one gate linked to another, step through one, go out the other. The magical network that maintained these had fallen under dragon rebel control, and they had basically shut it down. You would think that this had made a lot of non-dragon Nohde really cross, but apparently other Nohde could conjure different gates somehow – and everyone used their own network, because you couldn’t use each-others for some obscure reason. Magic is apparently racist, go figure. At least it seemed to work a bit more sensibly than the floo network, as there was but a dark sparkling void in the gate and upon entry you would come out in the next instant through the void in the other gate.

It would take a while before I would learn that the other Nohde had other means of getting around: The scarabs and gryphons had magic that let them fly in the appearance of normal birds or bugs, but at crazy great speeds, and the other Nohde had their own kinds of teleportation magic to get around. Cow Nohde could apparently somehow teleport between herds of cattle – to this day that doesn’t make any sense of me.

The dragon wizard in charge of the Singapore dragon gate was at first rather exasperated – this made sense: His one source of business had dried up as the gate network was down. When we arrived and wanted to pay for transport to the council he just looked at us and flicked his forked tongue at us – he was in mid-form. At least he spoke English fairly well, though with a thick Singaporean accent.

It was then that my phone buzzed with a text message from Piotr – or one of his staff, asking for me to confirm that I was at the gate. I texted back that we were there.

The gate itself looked like a stylized torii gate, like the big wooden ones you’d see all over Japan. Only this one was made out of recycled street street lamps, and was covered in scribbles that looked as if drawn with a silver metallic marker – all in all it was a rather dull looking bit of mangled modern art and graffiti. Thirty seconds after I had replied to Piotr’s text the scribbles lit up, and the wizard was so startled that I couldn’t help but laugh: A thoroughly frightened mid-form dragon looked surprisingly funny to me.

Another text ticked in a few seconds later: “You have 40 seconds left before we kill the network again. Reply to this text once you need to leave Castle Feuerstein”

Delightful.

The wizard worked quickly, as I explained the time limit. He was apprehensive about ‘cooperating with the usurpers’ – but when we added that we were doing all of this under duress to save the life of a friend, then he agreed.

The gate that opened up was like a dark event horizon. I felt thoroughly underwhelmed as I stepped through – at least it didn’t rain on the other side.


	7. Audience to Deaf Ears

We exited through a gate hewn out of the side of a mountain. It was the same design as the one in Singapore though, and same glowing scribbles, but looked much prettier. We were at the far end of a really big cobblestone-covered courtyard, inside what looked a bit like a 13th or 14th century castle. It was like something out of a Disney movie: Ornately carved and painted half-timbering, immaculate red-fired brick-work. Seriously, this place was amazing – a shame what would happen to it later.

Near the gate was a very surprised looking mid-form dragon in what looked like a hastily-put-on morning robe, holding a staff that was also covered in glowing runes. He greeted us in German. I don’t speak German, but I think he said something to the effect of ‘hi’ and ‘who are you’.

Mel ‘replied’ to the wizard with a gesture that produced some kind of magic sigil. The wizard nodded, studied the sigil briefly, then stepped back and began to cast a spell at us.

I wanted to get out of the way, but Mel held on to me and reassured me that this was quite ok. The spell made my head spin for a split second, but after that things came back into focus.

It turned out to be a translation spell, and the sigil Mel had shown was a kind of ‘translation key’ that had told the wizard what language we mainly spoke – English – so he could cast a “English to German” spell on us. It also worked the other way around, though to me it just sounded as if the wizard had really bad dubbing on. Mel assured me that the spell would ‘synchronize’ better after a few minutes once I got used to it.

With all that out of the way, the wizard asked us who we were and how we got the portal working again. That moment, the portal flickered out and the glowing scribbles on the gate structure faded. The wizard looked ready to cry.

Apparently the portal lockdown had meant that him and his co-worker had been forced to ‘babysit’ the portal 24/7, in 12 hour shifts, in the event of it coming back on – he hadn’t been home to his family since the coup had started because everyone in the castle was apparently stuck there. 

I wanted to feel bad for the guy, I really did – but at the same time I couldn’t stop wondering why he didn’t just quit and fly off in the night in full dragon form, but from what I had been told of the council then I guess one didn’t just walk off the job with them as your employer.

Anyway, we explained that we had a message from the coup leaders – I had been instructed to use plural for that by Piotr; He had told me that he had other co-conspirators, other Nohde who were in bad standing with the council that wanted to get back at it. To absolutely nobody’s surprise then there was no shortage of people and Nohde on the council’s shit-list, considering how they ran their magic-learning racket.

We also quickly added that we were delivering this message under duress, since Adia was still a prisoner.  
The wizard nodded, looking somewhat dejected: “They’re the ones messing with the gate stones, aren’t they?”

We confirmed that that was how we understood the situation.

“Fuck me... I knew it was too good to be true” the wizard said – apparently the ‘official’ council story had been that the gate network was down to prevent rebel forces moving around.

Guards and servants were called in, all of them dragons in mid-form at least seven foot tall. At least Piotr had been kind enough to dress me up for an official council audience – this time it was Mel’s turn to look woefully underdressed, her clothes still the same casual skirt and designer blouse she had worn when we had left for the bone yards.

The guards escorted us across the very spacious courtyard. I figured it at least five by five hundred meters, probably bigger – it was difficult to tell. The castle towered up around it – with at least four towers jutting up even higher than the roofs. Seriously, it looked like something nicked out of a live action Disney movie, one with a far too big set design budget. It had wizard dragons in it for crying out loud! 

We were led inside the castle and met a seneschal or master of ceremonies or something. He looked like some pompous prick who had just recovered from a seizure in a Game of Thrones dressing room, and sounded very much as if he enjoyed hearing himself talk as he lectured us on council etiquette and protocol, because we were obviously idiot plebs who knew nothing of how to behave before the council. Well, in my case that was true.

Ok, etiquette and protocol – Piotr had already given me a primer, chiefly in explaining how the oddly unwritten, but known by all, rules about the council worked: You had to clear what you wanted to present with the council, with a councillor in advance, which was apparently the primary filter for things the council wouldn’t like. It was also the biggest source of income for the councillors, as bribes to councillors in exchange for permissions to speak to the council weren’t just common, they were expected.

This wasn’t what was told to us by the seneschal – he had apparently been made aware that we were here as messengers for the usurpers, so he chiefly tried to impress on us that necessity to couch anything we said to the councillors to make it clear that we didn’t like what we had to say. You know, a polite and thinly veiled message along the lines of “If the councillors think you’re a usurper you’ll be executed on the spot”.

No wonder Mel had been so spooked about meeting the council – this had started feeling a lot more like a suicide mission than I liked. It didn’t help that the seneschal gave off a very noticeable “disdain for plebs” attitude towards us.

Leading us down a long hallway lined with very nice suits of armor from the earliest dark ages to the fanciest renascence kit, the seneschal finished off his instructions by bemoaning that the council currently wasn’t present in full: “However, Councillor Gilderstern’s second is present and will receive your message”

The door to the council chamber was huge – not big enough to fit a true-form dragon through, but big even for a mid-form dragon. As the doors swung open I saw the very same grand table I had seen on Piotr’s video.

At the end of the table sat two individuals. A young man in a very snazzy and no doubt very expensive business suit who sported a well-trimmed chinstrap of a beard, and a young woman in an even more expensive looking designer dress that had some very nice amber colors going on, accented with gold and some kind of green gemstones she had on for jewellery. Both had black curly hair and looked maybe a few years older than me, but that could just as well have been their attire, though both looked like they belonged in a boardroom somewhere, not in a medieval fantasy castle.

“Introducing Lady Eva Gilderstern, second to Lord Gilderstern, and Sir Kurt Gilderstern” the Seneschal loudly proclaimed, while I looked at the fancy heraldry hung on the wall to the right of me: it had a lot of very nice-looking swords, 17ths century looking halberds and other old-school weapons. It fit the overall late-17th century look of the castle very well.

The lady gestured for us to approach. We did so, and Mel introduced us. At that moment I found it a lot more interesting to look at the really fancy display of medieval and renaissance weapons hung on the wall opposite to the windows facing the courtyard. Crossed swords, rapiers, shields large and small with draconic heraldry, flintlock duelling pistols, and other types of weapons were all displayed quite neatly, the lot of it looking expertly maintained.

“Very well - let’s hear your message” Lady Gilderstern said, her accent sounding not very German at all. Swizz maybe? It was difficult to tell due to the translation spell.

I produced the second smartphone I had been given by Piotr – it contained all the documents, videos and other things that Piotr had wanted me to give to what remained of the council. As I pulled it out, it rang.  
I tentatively answered it, and was met by Piotr’s voice who told me: “Give the phone to the Gilderstern kids”

I slid the phone down the length of the table.

The two Gildersterns looked unimpressed – having a phone tossed to them was probably not what they had expected. Answering the phone, the lady listened to what Piotr had to say for about a minute or so... and it did not take many moments after that for her to take offense, to the point that she threw the phone down the table and with a swift but very angry gesture shot lightning from her fingertips at the thing, until there was but dust and slag left.

The scattered pile of ash, shards of plastic slag and scorch-marks on the table simply vanished a few seconds later – the table looking good as new. Bloody magic, how does it work?

Looking up at me, the lady sneered at me: “You have some nerve bringing this to me”

I threw my hands up, proclaiming: “Don’t shoot the messenger – I’m only doing this because he has my friend prisoner, and said he’d release her if I do this”

Not even acknowledging my reply, the lady drew her gaze over to Mel: “What exactly is your excuse? One would think that someone as well educated and trained as you would be able to manage a mere shadow”

Mel looked like she was ready to piss herself in abject terror. Personally, I found the lady’s tone towards my girlfriend very offensive, not to mention the implication that I was something to be ‘managed’ or otherwise controlled. Oh if I had only known.

Now, I voiced this displeasure in polite but by no means uncertain terms. Again, the lady ignored me.

I’ll admit that at the time I had no clue how these posh gits had been raised or otherwise instructed when it came to non-Nohde and shadow interactions, but this was getting rude – but due to all the warnings Mel had heaped on me I chose to voice my displeasure in a form more appropriate for a gentleman... well, I tried – in retrospect I should probably have tried harder.

The young sir Gilderstern didn’t take kindly to this – in fact, he took offense: “How dare you! Shadows do not, ever, speak before the council!”

“Kurt dear – if you won’t let him talk, how is he to tell us his message?” the young lady stated, her voice filled with a mix of snark and disinterest, which was a stark change from the sudden burst of outrage she had displayed just moments earlier at whatever Piotr had said on the phone.

Turning to his sister, Kurt looked almost equally offended that his sister didn’t want him to rage at me and spoke to her through gritted teeth: “He is a shadow – they are not to speak at council! And he simply brought us a phone!”

“Brother please, that was his message – don’t call in the executioners just yet” the young lady stated, sounding oddly bemused. I found her casual mention of executioners less amusing.

“I’ll be the judge of that!” said a old granny from a door to the chamber I could have sworn wasn’t there a moment earlier.

It was the granny that Adia and I had rescued outside of Prague! And she was wielding the same magic staff that had been used to kill Piotr’s boyfriend. Lovely.

The granny slowly made her way to the council table, the staff making metallic sounds as it struck the stone tiles on the floor. She sat down next to Lady Gilderstern, opposite to her brother – the two twenty-somethings sitting in silence, looking not entirely sure of what to say now that a real councillor was present.

I didn’t complain – the granny already seemed more sensible than the two would-be councillors.

“Lady Kasih, and my brave saviour – good to see you both again. I understand that you’re here not entirely of your own volition?” the granny asked, foregoing any kind of formal introduction and skipping straight to the meat of things.

I confirmed her statement, and added that the ‘message’ I was to deliver had been handed over – and destroyed. The granny did not look happy to hear that, but she focused her wrath on the two Gildersterns instead of me: “You get a direct message from the leader of this rebellion and the first thing you do is scream at him and destroy the phone? You fools!”

The granny whacked the young Lady Gilderstern over the head with her staff hard, messing up her hair and drawing blood – if the stains on the staff were any indication. It was a wonderful sight to behold, with the young lady looking absolutely dumbstruck over why she was getting punished.

I couldn’t help but snigger.

Kurt – unable to retaliate or berate the granny since she clearly outranked the two – turned his fury to me, using the sniggering as a pretext to exact his wrath: “You! How dare you laugh at your betters, and at council no less!”

He stood up abruptly, knocking his fancy council chair over backwards, and raised his right hand towards me with a gripping gesture. Next thing I knew I was being magically pulled into the air, as the young sir Gilderstern was evidently doing the magic equivalent of force choking me, Darth Vader style – except there was no rumbling noise in the background, just me getting chocked to death.

A swift strike with her staff once over Kurt’s wrist from the granny set me free – in retrospect I figure that made us even: I saved her back in Prague, now she saved me, though at the time it wasn’t quite that obvious that I was safe.

Kurt, looking just as betrayed and confused as his sister, but also seething with bottled up rage gave the elder councillor a perplexed look: “Why? You know the punishment for shadows offending councillors, let alone speaking at council!?”

“Who says he’s a shadow? He saved my life and that of hundreds of other nohde in Prague, and has been a great help to the council in understanding how this rebellion is working, including the identity of their leader and how their weapons work! He has earned his place in the light, and this is how you treat him and his message?” the granny roared, displaying a remarkable stamina and fury as she berated the two twats.

I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t seen Kurt’s type back at Bristol a few times – the “I was born with a silver spoon lodged firmly up my rear, behold my disdain for plebs” sort, the type of person who came from enough money that they had never really heard anyone say no to them in their lifetime. Seeing him stomp his feet at the old councillor was just brilliant.

“He insulted my sister! Shadow or not, you do not insult a councillor – even less so at council! I demand satisfaction!” Kurt almost screeched, making me momentarily doubt exactly how old the man was, because hearing his voice break made him sound as if still in puberty. Maybe he looked a lot older than he really was? The small beard on his chin did make him look a bit older, but if they had a bit of Mediterranean or middle eastern blood in them then he might have been younger than that.

Kurt drew his gaze from the granny back to me, giving me a poisonous glare while he fished a leather glove out of a pocket and magically flung it all the way across the table into my face. A telekinetic glove-slap. I took the glove and looked around for a dustbin. Seeing none I just chucked it on the floor – if he was going to disrespect me like that, then I sure as bloody hell wouldn’t either.

It was then that I noticed Mel’s horrified look.

“State your terms” Kurt snapped at me, his tone commanding and haughty, gesturing towards the fancy heraldry fixtures on his left with all the weapons on display. 

I couldn’t help but notice that both his sister and the granny both had a look of ‘Dear gods he did not just do that’ – if nothing else then that gave me some comfort, though I still wasn’t entirely certain on what was going on.

“Mel, did he just challenge me to a god damn duel?” I tentatively asked.

Mel forced out a sound – it was more yes than no, and I had only ever heard her make a sound like that the one time she dropped something really heavy on her feet and I asked her if she was ok – she had broken a toe back then.

Ok, so it was duel time. Where’s a trap card when you need it?


	8. Death Sentence

The council chamber was clearly not made for impromptu armed struggle – but the castle courtyard would have plenty of room, and the windows from the council room gave a clear view to the courtyard.  
Oh, and Kurt looked like the kind of spoiled little shit who had probably been trained in how to use each and every one of the weapons hanging on the wall – he appeared to really want me to pick one of them oh so bad.

I wanted, equally badly I would argue, to not get killed. Kurt Gilderstern clearly shared the opposite sentiment.

The tiny knot of panic and terror in my belly had at first not really been anything I noticed – but as silent seconds drew on, it grew quickly. It screamed at me to be silent – and my first thought was to drown it out as my mouth dried up, my desperate search for words failing me.

This thoroughly derailed my train of thought, as I landed on thinking of food – food sounded a lot nicer than fighting to the death.

Sitting down at the council table calmed me a little more, and so did further thoughts of food – this of course only pissed off my challenger, to which Kurt shouted: “Just pick something!” followed by some kind of insult that I don’t exactly how to spell, but it sounded spiteful and Yiddish which somehow wasn’t covered by the translation spell. Were the Gildersterns jewish? Right, of course the magical dragon jews were secretly ruling the world – Alex Jones had been right all along.

This call for me pick something came just as I was thinking about dinner – or lunch, maybe. It had been afternoon in Singapore when we had taken the portal to Feuerstein, and I hadn’t bothered to figure out the time. Either way, I ended up blurting out: “Curry”

The granny’s twisted into a very confused and wrinkled look: “An eating contest? How... unconventional. Or are you calling for dinner first?”

An eating contest sounded fun – plus I figured that a posh git like Kurt wouldn’t be able to pig out like a proper uni student – something I was quite well versed in, so if the eating contest was on how much you could eat, or speed, then I could probably beat him... time for cheeky Nando’s then?

The young sir Gilderstern looked very nonplussed at idea – but he held his tongue, for apparently the challenger had absolutely no say in what the challenge should be on.

The thought that if the Gildersterns were Jewish, then maybe I should make it a pork eating contest, did cross my mind.

...and that idea led me down the road of trying to rig the fight, because why not? I couldn’t see any reason not to: He had clearly tried to do the same, encouraging me to pick a duelling weapon that he had probably been trained extensively in – and I knew just the thing for how to mess with him.

“Eating contest it is – I know just the place in the London Avalon” I said. I remember smiling at the time, though I’m not quite sure how much I did so. I was told later that it hadn’t been enough to make the Gilderstern’s suspicious.

The granny quickly pointed out that the gates were down, so transport out of the castle was rather difficult – but then the other shoe dropped, and she asked how exactly me and Mel had gotten to the castle in the first place.

I explained that Piotr had control of the gate network and that he had opened them up briefly for me and Mel – one phone-call later and Piotr had agreed to let me, Mel and the Gildersterns gate out. It had been part of my original deal with Piotr: Passage from Feuerstein, though he had been a little surprised that we didn’t want to go to Tarsus.

The gate opened as expect at the agreed upon time – and the wizard there was weary of how long it would stay open. Kurt and his sister passed through very quickly.

Just before me and Mel left the granny handed me a rolled-up sheet of paper – it was an official council document, signed by her as “Councillor Maria Esteban”. Ok, so now the granny had a name.

The document itself was a writ that declared me ‘enlightened’ – I wasn’t a shadow anymore and now it was official. The only thing I could say to it was: “Mum is going to go mental when she sees this”

“Just make sure you live to tell her – Kurt is out for blood, and while the avalons might be neutral ground then he’s never been one to respect rules that didn’t serve his ambitions” Councilor Esteban warned me quietly.

I kept that in mind as I stepped through the portal, exiting out to the gate landing in the London Avalon.

The dragon wizard in charge of the London gate was surprised, to put it mildly, to see such highborn clientele appear before him – the way he bowed and scraped made you think he’d seen the ghost of Princess Diana.

“Where are we having this duel?” Kurt demanded, looking around at the shops.

Ignoring Kurt for a moment, I turned to check on Mel. She hadn’t said a word since we had entered the council chambers. She looked as if her parents were glaring down on her... was she that terrified of the council?

Stomping his feet as if he was a child, Kurt called attention to himself once more. I nodded somewhat reluctantly – I had no idea if that curry place was still open.

As luck would have it the curry place was indeed open. I went inside, along with Kurt’s sister Eva, to arrange things with the owner.

The rules of the duel were simple enough, and we had agreed on those before going through the gate with Councillor Esteban as witness, but we still had to go over them with the shop owner. One of the rules were apparently that the challenging party had to pay for the duel, a rule I had first learned after picking the eating contest - had I known of it in advance I would have tried to ruin the two fools. I should note that another rule that had been agreed upon before going through the gate had been to remain human, since I didn’t know how to shapeshift. My official argument had been that in mid-form Kurt would have had a bigger mouth, which would be unfair – Councillorh Esteban had allowed this rule for the duel, just as planned.

Either way Eva paid for two plates of three-star pork curry – Eva didn’t object even though the dishes wouldn’t be kosher. Oh well, so much for that ploy. On the plus side she paid no attention to the menu or the warnings written on them – she seemed far too busy expressing how annoyed she was at my silly choice of duel with snarky commentary.

After Eva paid and went out to fetch Kurt, the minotaur-looking fellow with the Manchester accent at the cash register quietly asked me: “You’re not eating it, right? You do know three star isn’t for straight humans” – it basically sounded as if the guy had recognized me from when I had eaten there with Mel.

“Oh that’s not an issue anymore” I said, showing my document from councillor Esteban.

The Nohde nodded casually and congratulated me, then went on with his business.

Kurt came in, sat down at a table for four. His sister sat down next to him, with me and Mel sitting down next to me. Kurt did not look impressed: “Really? You do know they serve curry-wurst every Tuesday at Feuerstein”

After that nobody said a word. The Gildersterns were silent. Mel was silent. I was hungry. Kurt kept trying to kill me with his murderous glare.

When the food finally came Eva let out a sigh of relief: “Finally. Make this quick Kurt – we have a flight from Heathrow to Tel Aviv in two hours”

Well that confirmed that I figured – they probably did have some Jewish ancestry going on, but then Eva hadn’t objected when I had ordered the pork curry. Probably not practicing jews then.

As a referee the curry shop owner came up to judge a winner: “The first to finish his plate wins – no spillages or waste allowed”, while the Manchester-sounding minotaur at the counter pulled out a camera-phone, but the Gildersterns were sitting with their back to the counter so they couldn’t see the camera trained on them.

The owner raised a half-hoofed hand – it looked really stubby, with only three fingers, as if his index and middle fingers had merged, the same for his ring and pinky fingers: “Go!”

Kurt wasted no time. Grabbing his spoon he had four spoonfuls of rice, sauce and veg in his mouth before I had even reached for the spoon. Then again, I wasn’t in a hurry.

I guess in retrospect my main plan had simply been to mess with Kurt in order to make him concede the duel – but in that split second as I saw how quickly he was basically trying to inhale his food I started pondering a plan B, namely to honourably admit defeat and apologize for my actions if he at least got more than half the plate down.

But after that split second I saw that things were still going in favour of plan A.

With four spoonfuls alchemically-enhanced curry incinerating the insides of his mouth, running down his throat like burning napalm, Kurt very quickly stopped moving. His right hand trembled, his filled spoon with what would have been his fifth spoonful coming to an abrupt halt over his plate.

Now, Kurt’s hair was done up very well – he looked the sort to have it trimmed weekly, and probably had whoever did his hair for him waste more money on hair-products monthly than I spent on shampoo annually, but no amount of fancy hairdo could hide the giant beads of sweat that were very quickly starting to amass on his forehead, around the hairline, his temples... and soon running down his face.

It was a delight to watch Kurt try not to squirm. His eyes watering, looking down at his plate in absolute despair – even with five spoonfuls removed he wasn’t even a quarter through it all.

I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t witnesses scenes like this before – I once had some college mates take me to a curry place in Soho once, where we had all found ourselves thoroughly outmatched and utterly defeated by the strong curry served to us. Ever since then we had joked that should have another go, perhaps train ourselves beforehand. Ah the memories of the incendiary shits we had afterwards still warms me at night.

Ok, Kurt had stewed long enough. It was obvious that his entire mouth was on fire and that he was but a fraction of an inch away from simply crying – but the duel wouldn’t end until someone finished their plate, or someone gave up – so I poked around on my plate with my spoon, taking meticulous care to only scoop up white rice that hadn’t touched anything with actual flavour in it, and then I ate that. This put me miles ahead of Kurt – for it was clear that he hadn’t swallowed, and that he really didn’t want to either.

“So, what’s it going to be – do you give up? I asked, waving my spoon at Kurt in a playful manner. Well, it was my intention that it should look playful, but the look he gave me... good gods.

I could feel his gaze burning into my face – but at the same time his mouth was bulging, his entire body shaking, his eyes not as much watering as they were flooding, and his face was drenched in sweat. Had he looked at me without all those other things going on I would likely have recoiled in terror, but instead I mainly wanted to have a cheeky giggle.

Failing to answer me within the first fifteen seconds or so was probably what made his sister catch on to the fact that something was amiss, as she had been poking around on her smartphone. Of course, it didn’t help when she elbowed him in the ribs to make him say something – because that just made him vomit the contents of his mouth and stomach down over his plate, his business suit, his pants and his shoes.

I knew that schadenfreude was a mean thing to express – but by the great stonking tits of female black Jesus working on her pole-dancing – then it was not easy to hold back my laughter. 

The clerk at the till showed less restraint – bursting out laughing: “Looks like we have a winner!”

Kurt barely managed to look up, the shop owner nodding: “You were supposed to eat all of it – not sick it on the floor mate – victory goes to the gentleman who actually ate part of the dish by default”

Eva Gilderstern yawned ever so slightly, displaying no care for her brother or his current condition, only displeasure at his disgraceful behaviour: “Great – come on brother, you’ve embarrassed the both of us enough for today. Let’s go get you cleaned up and catch our flight”

The Gildersterns got up and left, Kurt tracking sick from the puddles on his pants and shoes across the floor. The shop owner called for the young man at the till to go clean things up.

On their way out Kurt turned and shot me another truly venomous glary. Wiping sick from his mouth on his sleeve, he spat on the floor: “You... you little shit – I will get you for this”

“Sure you will – tell you what, how about we just part ways amicably: We don’t have to like each other, but holding a grudge won’t benefit anyone” I suggested, trying to sound at least a little diplomatic. I will, even to this day, hold that I meant that quite seriously: He might have been a right little cunt, but that’s his choice on how he wants to behave, though that shouldn’t have to mean that we shouldn’t depart on neutral terms like gentlemen.

Kurt took a few heavy breaths, composing himself ever so slightly. I felt Mel grab my right hand tightly under the table.

“Oh you really got a hell of a deal there. You really should have kept a tighter leash on him – and with Maria letting him lose you don’t even have a claim on him anymore. Such a waste of a good bloodline.” Kurt said spitefully, not to me, but to Mel.

This confused me a little to begin with, but as he said it I did piece most of it together: Back in the council chamber they had started out talking to Mel, something that I at first had attributed to them thinking that a shadow wouldn’t really know what to say, or maybe because I was considered so beneath them that I couldn’t or shouldn’t speak to them at all – with the later turning out to be true.

What I hadn’t pieced together until just then was the implication that Mel should somehow be in control of me, purely on account of me being a shadow. I guess in retrospect that Piotr had tested me on that just the same when we had met, using his questions to test how much I was able to function independently.

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself: I was trying to figure out what Kurt had meant, and he quickly picked up on the fact that I hadn’t quite understood what he was talking about – and of course he saw that as an opening to exploit.

His tone was thoroughly overflowing with sadistic glee as he saw my face while he spoke to Mel, putting even Tom Hiddleston’s best villain acting to shame: “Oh he doesn’t know, does he? How your family paid his mother and his father’s estate a fortune for the rights to him? And now that Esteban gave him a light writ your claim on him is null and void. All that time and energy to protect your family’s investment, such a waste”

I wasn’t sure if I should be looking at Mel or Kurt at this point: “Wait – who bought what?”

“Your hand in marriage! You are daddy’s illegitimate only child, last of the line of Gong’Zhi – my father arbitrated the negotiations! You wouldn’t believe how big the dowry was for a bastard like you, but to see all that wasted? Now that, that is funny” Kurt explained, looking as mean and spiteful as it was possible when your front-side was hosed down in your own sick – but the words still hurt.

Mel’s family had... bought me? Bought the rights to me, like an arranged marriage? And mum had been in on it?

“I think I would have been...” my words trailed off – of course a shadow wouldn’t have been told about an arranged dragon marriage.

I looked at Mel in disbelief. She averted her gaze in shame.

“Come on – let’s go get you cleaned up and some new clothes – you’ve done enough damage” Eva Gilderstern said, pulling at her brother forcefully. I don’t quite recall the look on her face. It looked... annoyed, sorry maybe, but I don’t recall enough to tell if it was her being sorry over Kurt having basically broken my heart and tried to ruin me and Mel’s relationship – and arranged marriage – or if Eva was more upset over how Kurt had embarrassed her and her family with his behaviour. Maybe both? We’ll never know.

Once the Gildersterns were out of the door Mel shook – at first I thought it was a seizure, but then she started crying and slapping me: “You idiot! You stupid stupid idiot! You ruined everything!”

Considering my mood at the moment I was in no condition to take that kind of abuse – it was obvious that it had something to do with the council business, but specifics would be nice. I didn’t get the chance to ask, for the next thing I knew was Mel drawing me in for a kiss, after which she very quickly said: 

“The Gildersterns are well known for funding the council enforcers – that’s not the guardians, not the knights, but the council assassins. If we want to live to show your mother your writ of enlightenment we need to get to Tarsus, and fast. I don’t care if you hate me, but damn you I will not let you get killed like this, not now, not when you’re this close to the light!”

Of course the council would have their own secret black ops killers to run around and murder dragon Nohde that threatened their interests. Why not?

Writing this so long after the fact, the temptation to embellish what I did here is noticeable – but at least I can say that I finally understood why Mel had been so frightened. I guess she hadn’t expected any Gilderstern representatives at the council? I wanted to be angry. I wanted to be upset. No, I was absolutely terrified at the prospect of having council death-squads hunting me.

Mel used magic to somehow make it easier for our cab to get to Heathrow quickly. A flight would actually have been a really good thing for us to get a head start, but the first one of those to anywhere near Tarsus had three hours until it even began boarding – and that was plenty of time for the Gilderstern duo to show up for round two.

I want to say that maintained my cool during all this. I didn’t. I was terrified – but I had a difficult time expressing it: Part of me still wanted to protect Mel, even though now more than ever she was the only thing that could really protect me, Adia still being in the wind.

We ended up on a flight to Cyprus. Once again, we flew first class – but unlike last time, when I had been shot and didn’t know what was going on, then I had a grim air of certainty about me. Well, at least some certainty, and quite a lot to be afraid of... but also things to be angry about.

Mel had anticipated that we’d end up talking about the arranged marriage during the flight, and prepared some kind of magic that let us speak clearly without others being able to hear us.

“Ok, now we can talk – and I just want to say, that this was something my parents set up. You’ve seen how they treat me! In the begining I didn’t want anything to do with it, or you” Mel began, pre-empting any kind of angry outbursts from me. In fact, having said that, and looking very sincere while doing so, did quite well to lessen my anger. Of course, no longer nearly as angry, I found myself able to ask more poignant questions: 

Looking back at my relationship with Mel, her claim that she had not wanted anything to do with me struck me as a bit odd – because the Mel I knew, at least up until a few hours ago, really loved me: “So what changed that?”

“I... I saw how you treated your girlfriend. You’ve seen how my parents order me around – you were nice... are nice. I was originally worried that you’d be like your father” Mel explained.

Apparently my father – the last scion of the Gong’Zhi family, one Kalle Gong’Zhi, had been in the dragon council for close to thirty years and had been part of the inner circle of dragon Nohde that had ruled all other dragon Nohde – and he had been a short, potbellied little Swede who’s family had moved to Scandinavia sixteen generations ago. Mel didn’t have a picture of him, but said that I had apparently gotten all my looks from my mother. Ok, that explained why Mel’s family wanted to marry her into the Gong’Zhi, especially if those jokers were that obsessed with bloodlines. 

I should probably have been more upset over things – or maybe not. This was the first time I had found out that I had been sold off to an arranged marriage without my knowledge – I didn’t exactly know how I was supposed to react – but there was one thing...

“You said you saw how I treated Anita, my ex – did you have anything to do with her breaking up with me” I said. Mel nodded, but not as if to say yes. It was more of a ‘sort of’ nod.

The story Mel told was that she had been so happy to see that I was nice, and that I was treating my then girlfriend like a true equal – not dominating and mistreating her like Mel’s parents had her – that she had not wanted to break up my relationship. It was her parents who had expressed other plans, and had sent someone from their staff to use magic on my now ex to have her break up with me. From what I had seen of Mel’s parents at that point, then that kind of behaviour did not surprise me.

“I guess that explains how you were able to suss out all my favourite hobbies so quickly” I pointed out – Mel admitting that indeed, that was because she had basically stalked me before trying to meet me.

It is difficult for me to put into words how I felt at that time. It was a special kind of betrayal I felt, that much I do know, but even now with everything over I find words for it difficult. Having had time to think of it, I would describe it a bit like a mix of going to a party and meeting a sweet girl who you end up going home with and sleeping with, only to discover that she was a prostitute who was bought and paid for by a random stranger for some reason. It felt devastating. Adding to that, then I have no idea what kind of magic was used on my ex – all I know is that one day she refused to see or talk to me anymore, claiming that ‘I knew what I had done’ and blocking me on all her social media. It had happened so abruptly.

Another parallel would be to compare it to going to a club, meeting a cute girl, dancing, grinding and perhaps fooling around a bit in a corner, only to learn that she did it because of a dare or a lost bet with someone else. She might have liked it, but ultimately, she hadn’t done it because she wanted to.

After that thought had played out in my head, the scenarios and parallels I was using to describe my experience and feelings, it all started to get a bit more abstract and far-fetched. Like going to a bar, meeting a pretty lady, buying her drinks, only to realize that she was hitting on me because her pimp was ordering her to approach other men and swindle them out of their time and resources... though that really didn’t match me and Mel’s relationship because she had been quite good at ensuring that she at the very least paid for half the things we did together.

Ultimately Mel was verging on breaking down in tears. She was quite honest about what her family had forced upon the two of us wasn’t fair, though she did maintain that she too had simply been a pawn in a greater game. 

Part of me wanted to comfort her, for part of me still cared for her – but at the same time then I simply didn’t know if I could trust that. Her family had paid the Gong’Zhi family a fortune to basically ‘buy me’ – with an expectation that I would be placed under a spell that would rob me of my mind and turn me into a meat puppet for her to order around and produce a few blue-blooded heirs to ennoble her family. Was she just pretending to be upset in order to protect her family’s investment? I had seen how her parents could control her – how could I trust that she wasn’t simply obeying orders right now? Was she crying more because she felt she was going to get into trouble with her parents?

I couldn’t tell – and the uncertainty was killing me.

Raising my voice in anger at her did nothing – her spell meant that nobody else could hear or react to what I said or did. Was her getting calm and quiet part of her being aloof and in control of me somehow, or a display of apologetic submission? Could I even trust my own senses? Had she put a spell on me already?

She said that she had refused to learn that spell – that she found that kind of mental domination far too abusive.

I wanted to be able to trust her – I really did. I wanted to comfort her and stop her crying, but I had nothing that could confirm her claim. That feeling of despair, of having truly no idea of what to do, or what I could do, that sucked in a way I neither can nor want to put into writing. I can only advice that you never find yourself in such a situation yourself.

We landed in Cypress in the late evening. Considering how many time-zones that my body had gone through over the last few days, it was amazing that I was still awake, let alone sane. Either way, this time we didn’t wait for nightfall. We took a cab to the same docks that we had previously snuck out via; only by the time we got there it was in the not so fun end of four in the morning. Jetlag? No, more like jet-whiplash.

At that point I hadn’t slept since flying to Shanghai. I suspected that Mel had slept during her captivity – or something like that – for she was far more awake than I was. Magic perhaps? How was I to tell.

Locating a somewhat out of sight boat landing track, blocked on every side by shacks and small buildings with fishing-net repair shops and other fishing related service industry, Mel began preparing magic of some kind. At that point I had already picked up on the fact that most magic, especially the really useful stuff, was not something one just conjured up with a flick of the wrist. There were arcane sigils to be drawn on the ground or in the air, and there were short but complicated chants to be made.

It wasn’t enough – we were discovered, and not by anyone we wanted to be found by.

At the time it didn’t quite make sense why Piotr and his rebellion would let the Gilderstern death-squads roam freely. Six men and women, all looking very heavily armed and very military-like, dressed as if they had leapt out of a Call of Duty: Black Ops 72 poster. They were armed with strangely oldschool weapons.

One of them, a muscular woman with an ugly haircut, had a claymore that I remember as being longer than she was tall. Another guy had a crossbow. All of their armaments had faintly glowing runes and sigils on them – you could see them glowing even in the dim light of the rising sun.

They did not look like the types who would let you pass, even if you asked nicely.

The split second that the crossbow was loosed, Mel went full dragon – her massive length coiling around me and shielding me.

...of course, that meant that she got hit with all the weapons, weapons made to kill dragon Nohde. Each hit, and thrust, and slash sent painful ripples though her body, me feeling each of them through her scales.

Mel’s head was crammed up next to me – and to be honest: Seeing a dragon crying... there was something deeply unnerving by that.

“I’m sorry...” she ‘said’ – her voice reverberating in my head. I don’t know how she cast magic, considering how she was coiled around me, but she did, for I managed to see a flash of light.

Next thing I knew I was lying on a bed. I recognized the old peeling ceiling paint and the shitty light fixtures: I was in the Tarsus Avalon.

Upon moving, I instantly regretted doing so – my body was was... pain. I must admit that words fail me on this: Describing this kind of suffering with simple written words cannot do it justice: It was a pervasive soreness that just utterly suffused me. Even breathing hurt – but none of it was the ‘ouch I have been stabbed’ kind of hurt. It was more like a dull pain, but much more ever-present in every muscle. I have been told that if you sprint a marathon, then you will feel similar to how I had probably felt.

That’s when I noticed that I didn’t have hands. I didn’t have a right arm either. My reaction to this was less than civilized.

Panicking I tried to look around, though I could not – but I was later told that at that time I was basically wrapped up like a mummy in bandages. I just know that it felt slimy, wet, and incredibly gross. My mouth felt wrong. I was apparently missing teeth – I couldn’t move my jaw right either, but I couldn’t see how it had been wired shut.

Mother came rushing very quickly. She had her right arm in a sling – she had not had her right arm in a sling last I had seen her.

That this was the first detail I noticed when she arrived – that it was the first thing that came to mind... was that strange? I guess every son would be worried if he saw his mother hurt.

I wanted to cry. I apparently couldn’t. Ever read that book “I have no mouth but I must scream”? I found that it described my despair quite well. I remember shaking about violently – I couldn’t do much else.  
There was a light – the next thing I remember is waking up later.

Time must have passed. I had my arm and hands back – and I could feel my feet. I hadn’t even felt that I couldn’t feel my feet earlier – I guess that made sense.

I know that when you write a story you’re supposed to show not tell – but how can I describe events I do not remember? I can only tell you what I was told:

Mel had lied to me.

She had very much known the spell that let you take command of the mind of a shadow – for she had used it on me, and it had been on me ever since we had started to date.

I had been commanded to kill the kill-team. I had apparently done so – no clue how. I guess I should have been a lot more distraught over learning this, but apparently the kill-team was made up of normal ex-military and special forces people, normal humans, not Nohde, that had similarly been mind-controlled via magic – and house Gilderstern wasn’t known for maintaining their kill-teams very well, simply recovering their kit if one dies, magically burning away their bodies and then hiring new killers.

I could only really think of how incredibly tyrannical that was. All of that, because some twat had felt that I had insulted his sister?

My thoughts of the council and the magical horrors it condoned were interrupted by my belly: My stomach rumbles were less of rumbles and more tormented screams as it twisted itself into a knot. How long had it been since I had eaten anything? I didn’t have any kind of IV drop in me, or feeding tubes – but then again, what I had seen of Nohde healthcare seemed to revolve around healing magic, not medical science.

Looking around, tentatively, and calling out for anyone to hear me, alerted me to two nice things and one less nice things: First of all it didn’t hurt to move around, at all. That was a big plus. Secondly then I had all my bits back. Two plusses. A minus was the new suite of bullet holes in the walls.

There had been fighting here. Fighting while I had been getting healed. Oh boy.

Mother came in. Her arm wasn’t in a sling anymore. Even better, she had brought kebabs and chilled water bottles along.

Hugs and tearful reunion nosh ensued – you know the sort: A mum who’s happy to see her son come back alive, and a son who’s happy to have gotten back alive to see his mother. She caught me up on the evens of the last few days:

Mel had barely survived getting the both of us to the Avalon, both of us barely holding on from blood loss despite her best efforts with Mel’s basic healing magic. It had been barely two days since that had happened – healing magic apparently worked pretty damn fast once it got underway.

I had woken up screaming shortly after they had gotten me into a room, before the healing magic had been cast – and the usurpers had attacked shortly after, but they had fallen back moments later – which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. I didn’t understand that at first, but mother said I should just answer everything truthfully.

Right, that only left me with more questions – but it seemed that it was not the time for my questions to be answered, especially not any about mother’s involvement with me having been sold to Mel’s family. Instead a knight in a worn uniform came into my room, in mid-form, and ordered mother out.

It was interrogation time – and while I did recognize the knight from my previous stay in the Avalon, then he behaved as if we had never met, questioning me about everything.

As mother had requested, I answered everything politely, but that simply didn’t suffice. The knight and his colleagues were quite mad at me over my duel with the Gilderstern joker. You see, I was under suspicion of having turned to the enemy and aided them by smearing the reputation of the Gildersterns. Sure, as if those cunts needed help getting a bad reputation. 

So I was now a traitor – because I couldn’t possibly have negotiated for Adia’s release, under duress, and then played messenger for Piotr without having turned to the enemy. Oh and Adia was also being held on similar charges of treason, also in the Tarsus avalon.

Nothing I said was good enough, everything I said was only used to incriminate me further. If I admitted to anything I was guilty. If I claimed to be innocent I was lying.

The light coming in from the window dimmed before the interrogation ended. I must have sat on my bed and talked for hours. Other knights came in and tag-teamed me, leaving me to get tired and slip up. Oh fuck you if I can’t remember what I said three hours ago – that doesn’t mean I lied back then!

Ultimately I was escorted just outside the Avalon. I thought they were exiling me, or otherwise just kicking me out – but one of them pulled out a silenced pistol, to which I very quickly figured that I was looking at my own execution... well, so long and thanks for all the fish? Of the three knights there two of them held me down, while the third took aim – not that he really needed at this range, him pressing the muzzle of the silencer to my forehead.

They didn’t even have the common courtesy of telling me what exactly I was being shot for, giving me a blindfold, though it was pitch black outside so seeing anything wasn’t exactly easy.

I waited several tense seconds for death. Not fun, would not recommend it. Hadn’t had enough to drink recently to piss myself.


	9. Inhuman

Held tightly on each arm just under my shoulders, unable to move, with a council knight pressing a silenced pistol at my forehead. Ya, that day could have gone a lot better. The worst thing was the relative quiet: I could hear the distant night-time bustle of Tarsus, the calm breathing of the two knights holding me and the one with the gun – and that was about it.

Five gun shots in rapid succession rang out, not silenced. There was an angry shout, followed by another three shots. The silencer wasn’t pressed against my forehead anymore.

“Are you ok?” my mother asked, as she checked the knights on the ground around me. It was too dark for me to really tell how hurt they were, but I could hear at least two individuals trying to speak, one with a gurgling “I have a sucking chest wound” kind of noise, and the other was a female voice who was trying to say something but was having trouble breathing for some other reason.

My mother produced a combat knife that looked an awful lot like the enchanted weapons that the Gilderstern kill-team had brandished, only smaller – I could see it by the glowing runes on it: They were emitting at pale green light, at least until the blade was thrust into some part of the dying woman. Once out again it glowed a pale red light, with brief flashes of green where blood hadn’t covered it completely. The sound of flesh and sinew yielding to steel on the way out is quite unique – not something you forget any time soon.

I think it was seeing the blood drip from the blade that made reality catch up with me. I had been so close to dying... hell, over the last week or so I had been close to dying several times! It was just too much.

I vomited and passed out. Kebab doesn’t taste good on the way up again.

I woke up in my bed again. It was dark outside, but the sun was rising. To my surprise it was Adia who had awoken me: “Come on – get dressed, we’re leaving”

“I... what? What clothes? Leaving to where? What is going on?” I blurted out – and let’s be frank, after seeing your mother kill three people who had just tried to kill you, then getting an explanation and some time to sit and think... well it sounded nice, but it wasn’t what I was getting.

Adia pointed to a plastic bag next to my bed and closed the door as she left. It had a fresh set of obviously locally bought clothes – not really a fan of muslim man-dresses, or whatever they’re called – I felt like I was half-way to wearing a burka.

Leaving the room I was surprised to find the Avalon very different from how I had last remembered it: There were signs of fighting everywhere – bullet holes in the walls, bigger holes where shotgun blasts had taken out chunks of drywall and wooden panelling, as well as plenty of places where makeshift repairs had been made.

It was clear that the knights had been fighting room to room, and the large variety of dark splotches of dried blood-spatter told grizzly stories of both slashing weapons and firearms having been used freely. The lack of bodies, and lack of bloody trails from corpses having been taken away, was probably best explained away with magic – that really shouldn’t have surprised me at that point.

In the main hall of the Avalon – which I remember previously having been full of scarab and dragon Nohde, like a mix of refugee camp and grand magic bazaar – looked very different compared to what I had last seen: There were no refugees, no stalls, no bazaar. Ok, some of the stalls were there, but they were empty. Makeshift barricades made of steel plating that looked scavenged from the surrounding fishing boat repair shops, and random bits of wood and car tires were spread through the main hall, some of which were in the process of being disassembled and cleaned out.

The people doing this clean-up looked like locally hired construction workers – though at least half of them were mid-form scarab Nohde. There were also people going around with wheeled buckets and mobs, cleaning up blood-stains. It felt incredibly empty, like a huge empty main hall of a convention centre with just the few dozen workers milling about carrying things away. There had been somewhere between six and seven hundred people here last I had seen the main hall of the Avalon.

In the middle a few tables and some chairs had been set up. Food and water had been set up there, and Adia, Mother and some other people I didn’t recognize were sitting there, talking.

I tentatively walked up to the table and was about to sit down when a sound I had not heard before came to my right: It was people coming out of a gate portal. It took a moment for me to realize that of course this Avalon would also have a portal.

The people coming through the portal was a squad of uniformed and armed asian looking men and women, looking very “rebel army” in no uncertain terms. They very quickly walked over to the table with mother, introduced themselves in some asian-sounding language, saluted, nodded and then walked towards the exit to the outside. What the hell?

Sitting down, I got kebab and bottled water placed before me. Didn’t have to ask, hadn’t thought to ask, though it did occur to me that I had gotten enough kebab over the last week and a half to last me a good six months or so – too much of a good thing and such.

I’m not really sure if they had waited for me to start eating, so I couldn’t start asking questions – but Adia and Mother began filling me on what had happened:

Adia had been returned shortly after I had delivered my message to the council, via the gate. Since the news of my stunt with the duel hadn’t spread yet at that point, she had simply detained as a formality – they had only figured that we had all been captured, so Adia turning up with no real warning... well, it made me question why the gates weren’t constant sources of accidents if you couldn’t tell someone was standing in front of a gate. I got no answer – so I kept eating my kebab.

While detained, Adia was interrogated. That’s how mother learned about me and Mel going to the council, because she had taken part in that interrogation. It was also during that time that Adia showed mother a few videos on her smartphone – apparently detained didn’t mean having her stuff taken away from her.

I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me, but of course Piotr had done his show and tell to other people than just me. Adia, being a junior guardian – an enforcer in the making, who hadn’t been indoctrinated enough to be shown the true horrors that Gilderstern kill-teams and the cruel whims of the council could lead to, had been receptive to his message.

“So... you were the double-agent that they interrogating me about? Seriously?” I said, finding Adia’s story strangely sensible.

“Once I got here and was put in my cell, I called my handler and told them how many knights that were left. I reported in after every attack they launched, even got them to call off their attacks when you arrived” Adia explained, pointing out that among the few dozen knights at the Avalon then none of them were security experts. They had more been of the enforcer type, not the ‘keep things secure’ variety.

For me this chiefly begged the question of what the hell my mother then did for a living.

“Did – past tense. Up until last night I basically hurt people for a living, working for the council – won’t deny that, but it’s not something I’m proud of either – and you do not get to quit once you’ve started working for the council” Mother explained, looking remorseful – it was obvious that she was feeling weighed down by her past acts.

While I picked my jaw up from the floor, another woman spoke up – a new face. She was apparently a lieutenant in Piotr’s rebel army, and had come in after Adia had reported that the place had ‘turned’ after Mother had shot the last loyalist knights.

“But where are my maners – my name is Li’Xi, and I’m basically here to pick up the pieces, get the Avalon up and running again and recruit any volunteers” Li’Xi explained. I blame Mel that I was actually able to instantly pick up how I was supposed to pronounce her name. No, I won’t tell you how, because fuck you I was about to become a dragon.

Indeed, for in her capacity as a rebel recruiter Li’Xi was trying to sign on as many defecting knights, guardians and enforcers as possible. The exact difference between the three still elude me, but mother being a fully fledged knight made her very desirable for the rebellion due to her ability to fight on equal terms with the remaining knights.

I was about to ask something when more people came through the gate – had they turned on the gate network permanently?

Apparently they had – it was part of their final plans to wrap up their rebellion. Li’Xi explained that what few pockets of loyalists that were left had been regrouping at Feuerstein via mundane forms of travel, meaning that the gate network could now be opened up again since the loyalists weren’t going anywhere. Adia was nodding – she and mother had apparently been briefed on whatever the rebels were planning already.

“Hold up – why are you then still recruiting people?” I quickly asked, for indeed, I had not been briefed.

The explanation was simple enough: Piotr and his generals wanted to storm castle Feuerstein and capture the last councillors, as well as any remaining loyalist, so the worst of them could be put before a court and made to answer for all the cruelties their regime had resulted in.

I gave mother a nervous look upon hearing that – was mum going to be tried for her part in Piotr getting his legs crippled after all this was over?

“Don’t worry – me and Adia are in the clear: We were only obeying orders, pretty much everyone was” Mother explained. Sure, but it wasn’t nearly that simple, for they had been promised a great deal of leniency if they helped capture castle Feuerstein, but I didn’t piece that together until much later.

That brought the topic back to me, somehow. Li’Xi wanted to recruit me. I failed to see how I could be useful.

“Your mother told us of your trophy collection from the shooting competitions you go to. You’re a good shot – and we have some very nice guns with fancy ammo” Li’Xi explained, putting on her best saleswoman attitude.

I was sceptical. I had a lot of participation trophies, but I had never won anything – and there was a big difference between target-shooting and then shooting to kill people.

“You should show him the gun” Adia said. She sounded as if she was joking. She wasn’t.

The best way I can describe the gun Li’Xi showed me was that it was a modified heavy machine-gun, the sort you would use in fortified emplacements. It had been modified so you could carry it around and fire it while on the move – though it still looked like it weighed a ton.

Xi’Li explained that the guns were made for mid-form dragons, not humans – and honestly, tempting me with the promise of giant guns? It sounded far too good to be true. Which it of course was, sort of – there wasn’t any kind of direct punishment waiting for me if I said no. Indeed, if bowed out I could go home... it would all be over for me.

...but if I joined, I could help assure that my mother and Adia would make it through storming the castle. Sure, I could get hurt just the same, but I wanted to help my friends more than I wanted to slink away to safety.

I won’t lie – I also didn’t want to opt out because I feared that doing so would mean leaving the magical community forever. I wouldn’t know how to get back on the inside if I left, and now that I knew that it was here that my mother worked and lived, I wanted to be part of that.

Adia protested: “Fred, you might be a good shot, but you’re not a soldier. You don’t have the training or the mindset for this kind of work”

She looked worried – genuinely worried. I guess it made sense: If Adia had spent the last several years watching over me, then seeing me march off to a deadly battle and get killed would probably feel like a bad thing for me to. It was a kind thought, but I had made up my mind.

“I know, and I don’t really know how to say it right, but I do appreciate your sentiment” I said, not quite sure if I should stand to say what I had in mind next. Somewhat awkwardly I got up: “You saved my life Adia, how could I ever live with myself if I let you march off to get killed without doing my part to keep you safe?”

It was difficult to get a read on Adia’s reaction to what I had said. She was smiling, but being of the really dark-skinned black persuasion, then I simply couldn’t see if she was blushing or not. She was fidgeting with her hands, as if looking for words that just didn’t quite appear to her. Maybe she was worried that I would get her killed instead?

“Good grief you’re taking on after your father – please don’t do that” Mother mused, shaking her heard.

I had no clue what she was referring to – I would later learn that my father, while shortly, portly, stout, and disgustingly Swedish, had also been loyal to a fault to those he counted as friends – something that had led to his death in fighting Piotr’s insurgents. Delightful.

It also turned out that even if I had turned down Li’Xi offer then I would have been ‘enlightened’ – because that came next, before we left for the rebel army staging area.

Two of the wizard knights, both dragon Nohde I recognized from when I had first been to the Tarsus Avalon, had been preparing the spell for the last hour. It apparently took a while to set up, but very little time to let lose. 

All I had to do was sit down on a very threadbare chair in the centre of one of the less shot up rooms of the Avalon. It was in the room next to where the magical scanner thing, which had been used on my bullet, was, though apparently that device had been dismantled and shipped off to a rebel base already.

Of course there was more to it all – but I was still tired, and probably a bit disorientated from having my sum total number of limbs change fairly drastically over the last days. Basically, there were a lot of details I’m missing in describing this.

When I sat down the two wizards came in. I recognize one of them, the guy who had worked the scanner on my bullet. They seemed in reasonably good spirits, no longer working for the council and all.

Mother, Adia and several others came in to bear witness – that was apparently quite common when shadows were brought into the light. A small table was set in front of me, with a candle on it right in front of me.

I noticed that Mel had also come in, standing behind a couple of others in a failed attempt to stay out of sight. I’m honestly not sure what kind of look I gave her at the time, because I was focused on what was about to happen to me, but I knew that I would have to confront her somehow after this.

Then it happened. I wasn’t a human anymore.

There are entire libraries in various Avalons dedicated to describing how magic feels and works to those cannot feel it or work it – none of them do the real deal justice. To describe how it felt turning into a dragon would be a similarly futile exercise.

Imagine never have used your nose and then suddenly smelling for the first time.

Imagine never having seen, only to suddenly open your eyes.

At the time I had seen more than one youtube video of blind people getting fitted with experimental computer chips connected to parts of their eyes in order to partially restore their vision – but that was all really low resolution stuff. It’s also completely unrelated to what I was experiencing, because what was happening to me was more akin to going from having the usual amount of senses to having so much more.

My eyes hurt – the candle in front of me had lit up, on its own! It was apparently my latent magic getting released that had ignited it. It had also set fire to my clothes, though I now had fireproof green skin. I also had scales, like a snake. I felt so smooth...

Lost in the strange new sensations of my own body, the much stronger smells that nose was picking up, the way that the flickering light from the candle felt like staring at the sun, I didn’t pay all that much attention to my surroundings. People were applauding me, but I was focusing more on how every breath I took brought a whole new plethora of tastes over my tongue. My hearing didn’t feel any different mind you.

“No, you have no claim over him anymore – I’m giving it to him” I heard in Adia’s voice. It was in an angry tone.

I turned to look, seeing Adia and Mel both holding on to what looked like a bathrobe. Give me a bathrobe? Why?

Oh, because I was naked. In front of everybody. But... I was also a twenty-five or so yard long dragon, my snake-like body coiled around and floating in the air, above the ground. Just, wow.

Trying to move felt like swimming. My tiny stubby arms and legs, each with really big claws, felt as if they were grabbing on to... air? No, it was the traces of water vapour in the air. It was a bit like worming your way through a ball pit, only the balls were slippery puffs of trace water vapour.

It made me wonder if flying into a cloud would be like running into a brick wall.

“Alright, get down here” Adia called out, holding the bathrobe out.

I coiled around a few times so I could level my head with her. She looked so tiny... but seeing her up close I also saw the water in her – that’s the best way I can describe it: I sensed the fluids moving in her veins and in her organs. It was a big jumbled mess to me, like someone softy blowing twenty muted whistles in front of me – it wasn’t a “loud” sensation, but it was there, and it was really strange.

Adia talked me through how to get down into mid-form. It involved keeping my eyes locked to hers, and exhaling, but instead of my lungs deflating it would be my body... which was weird, but by keeping my eyes linked to her I didn’t even notice that I was suddenly standing on the ground with my lizard feet. Did this make me European royalty, being a lizard person?

“So... this is what all the royal families really look like? Neat” I humorously observed, looking at my scaly arms. It wasn’t tough scales, but more like snake skin.

Adia gave me the bathrobe, I accepted and put it on – and that was it... I was not really a human anymore.

My senses weren’t nearly as keen in mid-form as they were in true form, but it was still a lot more than what a normal human could sense. My step felt light as a feather, and I still had a tail – it seemed to have a mind of its own.

My little ceremony was apparently the last thing on the to-do list before everyone else started to leave through the gate. The Avalon was to be taken over by local Nohde again, as it had been before the dragon knights had apparently taken it over... I hadn’t even realized that the place had been occupied by the dragon council knights. I had figured that we had all just been taking refuge, not that in their hubris they had intruded on local scarab Nohde territory.

Navigating the doors and halls turned out to be a tad trickier now that I was a head or so taller than my usual self – but I was also tougher, no that being tough stopped it from hurting whenever I knocked my head or bumped by tail into something, but I did apparently heal a lot faster.

Pretty much everything had already been packed up already – and I expressed my thanks for people having waited for me. We left through the portal in short order, everyone carrying something, me included. This was apparently a rule for the gates: You couldn’t just push a cart through the gate – it had to be ‘within the aura of a soul’, as in being held, carrier, or worn by someone. Magic, go figure – at least it explained why the dragon gates weren’t used as a transport network for goods across the planet.

We emerged into a tropical location. It was hot, oppressively humid, and quite dark outside of where spotlights had been set up – it was apparently before dawn in that time-zone, which put us somewhere in Asia or maybe Indonesia or Malaysia. We never did figure out where exactly we were.

It was a huge military-looking compound – like a set-piece straight out of an 80s Rambo movie. A lot of old soviet-looking tents and gear everywhere, but it was all interspersed with dragon, cow, scarab, bear, gryphon and other Nohde, all in mid-form, among humans who also looked like they had plenty of stuff to do.

This was one hell of a secret Yavin forest base.

Piotr was there to meet us, in an army-green wheel-chair. Looking at him I had to wonder what he would look like if he transformed into true form. How could a dragon be crippled? Would it matter since you floated? Like so many other times over the last two weeks, then this was not something I got time to ask.

Mother and Adia, with their training in traditional Nohde close combat with bladed weapons, were led off to an armory to get them equipped. Piotr led me to a shooting range – he wanted to see me in action, in mid-form, using what turned out to be heavy machine guns, but using them like assault rifles.

Having poked around on a lot of online gun-nut forums, /k/ and other places online where weapon porn was the only thing on the menu, I had seen a lot of oddball combinations of attachments to guns. Tacticool as it was jokingly known.

I had never seen an old Russian machine gun like that fitted with a tactical 4x scope.

“This is not how you make a marksmanship rifle” I commented, beholding this soviet designed gun I was holding. It didn’t weigh much of anything to me, but at the same time it was painfully obvious that the weapon was made for more of a suppressive fire role, not a one shot/one kill setup. It had also been heavily modified, with parts of the receiver assembly changed.

Piotr seemed confident, smiling at me: “Try it – the recoil is magically dampened”

Recoiled dampened? That thing? I braced myself, positioned my feet the way the way that my old firing range friends had told me, and very gently squeezed the trigger. Even with my most gentle of caress the weapon let off four bullets before I could pull my clawed finger back. The whole firing motion, the four rapid jolts, they felt weird as the force propagated through my body. It was another reminder that this body was new and strange... still, the gun did not move an inch, despite the force I felt transferred into me.

I gave Piotr a look of disbelief. By my internal clock, the last time it had been night I had been on my knees, about to be shot. Right now I was in some jungle base, training with the rebel army. By my... I don’t know, but I had been asleep a lot lately. I was in Cyprus, my arm and my hand had been cut off. I had been mind-controlled. Before that I had been... controlled... lied to... people tried to kill me.

I wanted control of my life again.

I felt the weight of the gun in my arms. I held it tight. I felt the weight of the gun in just my right hand – it felt unnaturally light, magical forces rendering it almost buoyant in the air.

Holding the gun out in a stretched arm, as if the one-yard long weapon was but a dainty pistol, I pulled the trigger again. It was as if the gun itself became immovable while it loosed lead upon the targets downrange.

“What kind of fucked up magic is this?” was all I could think of asking.

Piotr gave me a pleased look: “Gun magic – try using the scope”

The scope worked perfectly. It was fitted for the larger anatomy of a mid-form dragon. The weapon simply did not move, as if cast into a block of soviet steel when I fired it.

Once I had accepted that I quickly found the weapon easy to use. Piotr was pleased as punch, and told me to report to Luitenant Li’Xi, then he left.

Once I was out of ammo I sought out Li’Xi. I found her mid-form, which was a strange experience. I was still mid-form, and seeing a female dragon mid-form up close... I could smell her in ways I had never smelled a human woman before.

It was at that point that Li’Xi generously commanded me to the armory for proper clothes and a proper amount of ammunition. Generous, in the sense that it got me away from her quickly – so I didn’t make any more of a fool out of myself than necessary, because my bath-robe did not do very much to hide my erection. You know, just me, standing there, holding my gun.

At the armory I given a very bulky ballistic vest that felt oddly squishy. It was a lot bigger and covered more than what normal human body-armor did – but then again, I was bigger and supernaturally strong. The officer at the armory explained to me that the weapons that council enforcers chiefly used were focused on old heavily enchanted medieval and renaissance weapons. Bullets were too small to be enchanted, but edged weapons and crossbow bolts had plenty of surfaces for enchantment inscriptions – and you needed that if you wanted to dismember Nohde properly, otherwise they would heal too quickly.

The bullets I got were dragon-killer bullets. That’s not what the officer at the armory called them, but that’s all I’ll ever call them.

After I got my kit I returned to Li’Xi who told me to get over to the barracks and talk to the officer in charge there, to get a bunk assigned to me. Once there I was to put on my armor and get used to wearing it, then stand down and wait for marching orders. 

A bunk? It sounded... communal. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Of course they had used magic on the barracks tent – it was bigger on the insider, huge in fact. I got my own room. It had a sink, a simple one-person bed, and a rack for clothes, gear and weapons.

I wondered where mother was, or Adia.

This was when Mel poked her head into my room, in human form.

“Hey... I... you look amazing” Mel said. It didn’t take a genius to tell that she was hesitant and unsure of what to say.

I felt similarly – but not for the same reasons: I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know if I could trust her, or if I could trust myself around her...

“You lied to me” This I could say to her, for this much I was sure of.

Mel closed her eyes, appearing for a moment as if she had just swallowed something truly bitter – which honestly wasn’t that far from the truth: She just swallowed the fact that I didn’t trust her anymore, even though I had yet to say it.

In silence she walked over to my bed and sat down. She did not sit down gently – it was a sharp and blunt drop. Not understanding the way my new enhanced senses worked, I failed to understand the sensory input I got several seconds before Mel welled up in tears and began to cry – for I had sensed the water within her move into a pattern of sorrow.

In crying, she told me everything I needed to know without ever speaking a word.

“You can tell your parents to ask for their money back on those dowry payments” I stated bluntly. I honestly wasn’t trying to sound funny or sarcastic, but it did come out in a very mocking tone. I felt conflicted on how I should feel about that.

She cried even more.

At that point in my life I had dated many girls. My ex had, until I met Mel, been my longest lasting relationship. Factoring in Mel, then she had been my longest lasting relationship.

A lot of the same feelings I had felt on the flight to Cyprus welled up inside of again – but this time... no, it didn’t feel any different – and that honestly wasn’t very comforting.

Looking at Mel it felt obvious what I could get if I chose to stay with her: She still appeared to like me, to want me, even if she didn’t have a ‘claim’ on me anymore... but at the same time I had absolutely no way of telling whether what she was doing was just an act, to carry out her family’s orders of securing a link to my father’s bloodline, or if it was genuine. This was so fucked up, and I was in no mood for thinking up ways to test her intentions.

“Just go... and if we... I live through this, then maybe we can talk – I don’t know... just, just go” I said, feeling a lot less confident or sure about my words than I liked. This was the first time in my life I was breaking up with a girl – it had always been the other way around, or a few cases of just drifting apart. A certain part of me was screaming at me in protest for abandoning a steady source of otherwise quite good sex and companionship.

Of course, with that in mind, she did rape me on the train from London back when all this started – that... she had been in mid-form. I was in mid-form now, she wasn’t. There probably wasn’t the thing she wouldn’t do right now to regain my good favour... I could do anything to her. The dark side might have cookies, but it wasn’t that tempting.

“Just go”

My mother raised a good boy – even if that meant doing the right thing then when nobody was looking.

She wiped her tears and gave me a long and drawn out sigh. It hurt to look at – I could instinctively feel the sorrow in the waters she shed.

Afterwards, sitting alone, I felt like the most miserable bastard in the world. I wanted to run out and chase down Mel, beg for her forgiveness. I wanted to run out and punch her for lying to me. For using that damned mind-control magic on me. I wanted to kiss her and tell her I was eternally thankful that she used that magic to save our lives... and then throttle her for giving me the trauma of waking up without hands or an arm and maybe even feet.

I didn’t know what to do. Without even thinking of it I changed out of my bathrobe to the army green outfit that I had been given at the armory.

A bell rang out – and a voice from outside my room shouted: “Dinner’s ready in the mess-hall”

Ok, apparently it wasn’t before dawn where we were – it was evening? Exactly what time-zone was I in?

The voice had that obvious translation spell twist to it – it wasn’t like an accent, but more like it had a slight delay from when the first part of the word was spoken to when the translation spell caught up, making the words seem slowly pronounced at first, and then a little too hurried towards the end. It was mostly noticeable with longer words, like mess-hall, or dinner – so once again I chose food as both the solution and distraction to all my woes.

Having no clue where the mess-hall was fixed itself very quickly: I just followed all the other people and mid-form Nohde going to the same place.

Like the barracks then the mess-hall tent was bigger on the inside. A kind of tent air-lock shunted you from normal space connected to the outside, to what could probably fit the great mines of Moria with room to spare. This was a mess hall designed for true form Nohde... and quite a few did indulge. Meal portions were scaled accordingly, sort of: There were several pens with live goats... and they weren’t for petting – they were apparently dragon dinner, messily so.

A small sign on one of the pens read “Only three goats per meal, don’t be greedy or you pay will be docked”

We were getting paid for this? I guess it made sense – not everyone at the base could be volunteers.

Still, being mid-form I settled for a comically oversized helping of some kind of noodly stir-fry dish. Poking and prodding my meal, I found myself with little too appetite – I was still upset over Mel... doubting myself, unsure if what I had done had been the right thing.

That was when Adia sat down next to me. She was in human form – and unlike me, then she looked pleased as punch. My foul mood didn’t go unnoticed for long: “What’s wrong Fred?”

I explained that I had ‘talked’ with Mel – the implication was obvious, and Adia seemed to know a little too well what I was talking about.

“But... you should be happy then. She doesn’t have any claim over you. Hell, I had half-expected her to object to you getting enlightened” Adia said in between mouthfuls of noodles and stir-fry.

Expressing yourself in mid-form wasn’t difficult – but it wasn’t quite like human expressions. You had lips, yes, but they weren’t nearly as expressive – but instead I could feel my face doing... things... I honestly wasn’t sure – but it communicated my indifference to Adia’s statements, as well as just how much that wasn’t what I was upset over surprisingly well.

“Hmmm... I guess you’re right – If anything it would have been a representative from your father’s estate that would have objected to the enlightenment, with all the money they’re going to lose out on” Adia continued, coming off as she didn’t care one bit about how I felt.

This time the look I gave her communicated that I was getting annoyed – and that was very much on purpose.

Quickly standing up, Adia slapped me – hard. It made my head spin – and I was in mid-form! Did she have some kind of magical muscle boost? I got to no time to react, for she grabbed my shirt and pulled my head down to her face.

“You think you have it hard? I’ve spent the last seven years of my life working to service the council, to become a guardian and maybe later a knight. How do you think I felt when Mister Vlademkin showed me exactly what my job would entail? I didn’t sign up to become a mob enforcer, to be a leg-breaker for a glorified set of crime families! You’ve barely dated Mel for more than a year! My life is basically over – I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do after tomorrow” Adia said sternly, her voice filled with a cold fury that could not be denied. There were no tones of despair in her voice, but it had been unmistakably sorrowful none the less – albeit tinted with a hope: She was sad, yes, but hadn’t given up or given in to despair as I had.

I won’t deny that her scolding made me feel as if my woes were terribly insignificant – there was truth to what she had said: In the greater scheme of things my loss was insignificant – and indeed, I was free. I could go back to Mel, or I could choose not to! I actually had a choice now. Before, if I had wanted to leave her there would have been some Kasih family wizard who’d have put me under a mind-control spell, if not Mel herself.

I recall taking a deep breath. The mess hall had many strange scents in it – so many people. Still, having taken that breath I nodded at Adia, thanking her: “When this is all over I’ll help you figure out what you can do next”

“You’ll thank me later alright – by the way, your mother wanted to speak with you. She has an important thing to teach you before the attack tomorrow” Adia said quickly, obviously assuming that I knew of this attack.

I did not.

She quickly explained: Apparently one other council member had escaped captivity and joined Councillor Esteban at Feuerstein. There, together with the Gilderstern kids, the young lady Gilderstern once again acting as second to her father, they were trying to negotiate what amount to a UN peacekeeping force to help quell the rebellion from the high council.

They were basically asking the high council for aid – or rather, they had asked. The high council was convening in a few days, and would most likely approve the request according to what Adia had been told. Piotr’s forces wouldn’t be able to stand against that kind of united force moving against it – but if the remains of the council were to fall... then it would be over. This had been a very recent development, to the point that Li’Xi had apparently not known of it when she had gone to recruit those left at Tarsus.

Lovely.

Thanking Adia once again, I finished my food and left to find my mother – Adia had said she was at the firing range for magic.

The aptly named firing range for magic was very similar to a regular firing range, except it seemed to have far more reinforced components... and a lot more scorch-marks, withered concrete and dirty great craters down the range.

Half a dozen officers were milling around mother, some coming, some going, all vying for her attention about all kinds of things – and none of them seemed to be using a translation spell I could understand. I recognized bits of german, several flavours of far-eastern languages and two very black officers who addressed her in an African language of some kind. Maybe Adia could have translated what they said?

Spotting me, mother quickly quizzed me on whether I had dropped out of mid-form yet at any point. I hadn’t. This pleased her – and I had no clue why.

Next up she quickly instructed me on some breathing exercises, which I then had to do for a minute or two while she skimmed clip-boards and confirmed orders and deliveries with the officers around her.

Finally she told me to try to exhale down the firing range, with a special little caveat: “...and once it happens, close your mouth quickly – don’t let it all out now”

I had no clue what she was talking about, but I did as told.

I breathed bloody lightning. 

The thunderclap alone left my ears ringing – the sharp flash of light burned into my eyes. 

Out of pure shock I also closed my mouth again. It tingled on my tongue... not in a really bad way, but like having chugged a big glass of fizzy drink spiked with too much lemon juice. It quickly faded in strength, but left a weird aftertaste – the taste of magic.

Despite the gout lightning only having lasted a split second I had apparently just ‘cut’ several thick trees down – exploding their trunks by vaporizing the sap inside where the lightning had hit. Wow.

Ok, so the big deal was that me being a shadow, I had lived all my life not doing magic – so there was a ton of magic welled up inside me. This wasn’t dangerous or anything, but if I used my natural mid or true-form breath weapon, I could let all that out as a devastating magical attack. Sweet, but you only ever got to do that once in your lifetime – after that it was regular lightning breath...

Mother then added that if I did want to shift back to human for sleep, I should be sure to hold my breath when doing so – to keep the magic in – and that was it: In a flurry of other people asking her things, in languages I didn’t understand, mother disappeared again. That was so typical of her.

Leaving the shooting range, I looked up at the sky. It was really dark – which made me wonder exactly what time it was. My cellphone had given up trying to maintain the right time zone long ago... but I knew I felt tired – and I had just had dinner.

Towards the barracks I was intercepted by a messenger who said that Piotr needed me over by the press pit. Ok – press pit? There was press coverage here?

The press pit turned out to be a exceedingly well named ‘pit’ lined in rough concrete, decorate to actually look like nice little television studio – if you looked at it from only one angle, the one where a very modern looking television camera was set up to look from.

Piotr was set in view of the camera, in his army green wheel-chair and a very nice suit – though the suit had somewhat grotesquely been tied up to reveal his withered twig legs.

The thickness of his legs looked as if he just had bones sticking around from his hip joints – no muscle at all. It made his feet look freakishly huge, though they just dangled lifelessly.

Oh and next to him was a grey-haired man on his knees, gagged and in heavy chains – and a magical looking collar with glowing runes. What the hell was going on here?

“Fred, great – you’re just who we need! Want to pull a fast one on the council?” Piotr quickly asked, patting his prisoner on the head. The prisoner squirmed, but seemed very securely locked down.

A very quick explanation followed, by a couple of Piotr’s PR people – well that’s what I thought they were: Apparently the council was moving a little faster than expected, so we needed to buy some time to ready the final attack. The plan was to mess with the Gildersterns, to force them to postpone the council meetings they were having until later the next day.

The way we would be doing this, was by using and abusing the prisoner present: It was the very only venerable Councilor Jakob Von Gilderstern.

Oh I just had to be part of that.

The cameras started rolling and live-streaming not many seconds later, and Piotr made a big deal of introducing me as the brave young enlightened shadow who made an ass of Kurt Gilderstern in what was apparently a viral video on magic social media. How the nohde had social media that normies couldn’t find was beyond me. The video was called “Spicy lad loses it” – of course they showed it. Looked hilarious, though they had cut out the threats and Kurt’s reveal about my having been bought and sold.

“Finally, having survived the tender love and care of a Gilderstern Death Squad after all that, Fred is here to express his love and admiration for our dear councillor here” Piotr said, gesturing towards me and the prisoner.

Now, I had been on the telly a few times before – chiefly in crowds or next to my mother at televised museum events – so I knew well enough to look into the camera and not be too awkward, but at the same time I was a bit tired and didn’t exactly feel that kindly inclined towards the man who would see his children raised like mob bosses – unless of course he himself was one, which from Piotr’s explanation he really was.

Piotr moved aside a bit, so I could step into the centre of the camera view next to Mr. Gilderstern.  
Looking at the man, with the amount of furious hate he was shooting at me from his eyes, I found it difficult to pity him. Grabbing him around his chin, as if about to administer some antiquated phrenology exam, I took a breath and held it, willing myself back into human form: “Jakob, after the last time I met your children I had just won a duel against your son. He had lost. They sent your hired killers after me, after that – that’s not very polite actions from such sore losers”

Mr. Gilderstern gave me a look that quite clearly said something akin to “And I am very disappointed that they didn’t kill you” – mind you with his gag he wasn’t saying anything other than mumbly angry murmurs.

Let me tell you: Righteous anger is a powerful high. I felt as if I would lift off the ground and fly up into the sky, such was that high for me at that time – but at the same time, then a stark realization kept me eerily grounded: It was obvious to me that Piotr expected me to torture and kill the man before me, live on telly and live-streamed on the internet, to mess with the Gilderstern kids’ heads.

Problem was that despite being dressed like a soldier, then I didn’t feel like a killer. Sure, I had – sort of, maybe – killed someone while under Mel’s spell... but like this? I’m sure if I asked for a gun, or a knife, or anything else I would be given it instantly.

The cleaning crew standing by was also a dead give-away.

Looking at him, at the prisoner before me, I could see that Kurt had taken on after him quite obviously: The same kind of well-done hair, though for Jakob it bore the marks of a few days’ captivity and no access to a hairbrush.

“Tell you what – since Kurt is now the Spicy Lad, that makes you Spicy Dad – so... Spicy Dad, you look like shit. Let us do something about that” I said, confidently glaring down at Jakob with a cruel smile growing over my face, for while I was not British, then I had learned well from them the art of being a complete cunt.

Mr. Gilderstern did not look enthused.

First up I gestured for the cleaning crew nearby to fork over their wheelie bucket with soapy water and their mop. Sure, mops weren’t made for personal hygiene, but there was a first time for everything.

Piotr couldn’t stop laughing. Most of everyone else looking on kept it to highly bemused sniggering as I face-mopped Mister Gilderstern.

Next up I concluded that after his good hard scrubbing, that his hair... honestly, there was no way I could save that.

“Does anyone have some scissors or shears?”

Mr. Gilderstern looked oddly pitiful and miserable as I slowly, albeit carefully, shaved his head for the whole world to see with electric shears. I recall having read once that forcing an ugly haircut on someone else was a very strong signal of dominance – not sure about that, but Mr. Gilderstern did end up looking like he had head-butted a lawnmower and lost.

Piotr fell off his wheelchair laughing. Quite a lot of others laughed as well during the procedure.

“Hey P – what’s our viewcount on the livestream?” I asked, as I brushed the last bits of shorn hair off my hands.

Someone held up a whiteboard with scribbles that read “+300.000”

That was a lot of viewers, though I had no clue how many that was relative to how many Nohde there were in total.

“Time for some hot waxing then? Darling, your eyebrows totally clash with your new hairdo – it’s disastrous” I noted, looking at Jakob with a delightful feeling of bemusement.

Jakob shook his head in despair, as if begging me not to do it. Oh, what fun things he might have said right there if not gagged.

I nodded reassuringly, smiling cruelly.

It took a bit for someone to drum up a proper hot waxing kit – I think someone actually took a gate to an Avalon and went shopping for it. Once I got the kit we got cracking, and half-way through applying wax to Jakob’s last remaining eyebrow I spotted another held sign up behind the camera. It read: “The Gildersterns have retired for the evening – Eva couldn’t handle it – we can stop now”

I crudely smeared the last bit of luke-warm sticky wax onto Jakob’s eyebrow: “Aw poo – done so soon? I didn’t even get started with the tattoo-needle”

Jakob’s absolute look of horror at the mention of a tattoo-needle... it was obvious that idea of being marked for life with ink terrified him far more than the humiliation I had subjected him to so far. Made me wonder if there was magic to remove tattoos, or maybe alchemical ink that couldn’t be removed?

“I’m thinking we write ‘Spicy’ on your forehead – so sonny boy will be reminded who he is whenever he sees you” I said, crouching down to get to Jakob’s level.

For the first time since we had begun the livestream Jakob actually began to tear up. Oh this was glorious. The rush of power was absolute. And of course the other eyebrow had be finished up either way.

As with the first eyebrow, then the second one was displayed proudly for all to see – stuck to the bit of waxing tape, no longer stuck to Jakob’s head. It would make for a fine trophy for someone else I was certain.

Being in a military base – even if it was more of a para-military setup – then of course someone had a tattoo-rig. The electric tattoo needle machine was a little heavier than I thought, but it was apparently made to allow for mid-form tattoos as well... basically it could punch though really tough hide using an enchanted needle.

I could probably have tattoo’d the man’s skull with that beast of a machine if I had wanted to.  
Grabbing Jakob by the chin and pointing him at the camera, and looking at it myself, I threw on an extra cheeky grin: “Hey Kurt and Eva – once we catch the two of you we’ll get all three of you matching ink done, how about that? Dadums here can be Old Spice, Eva can be Slag Spicy and Kurt can be Baby spice?”

Buzzing the needle menacingly towards the camera, I quickly gestured for the camera operator to cut the feed as I turned the needle back to my captive while I laughed. The small red light under the “Live” sign on the camera winked out a moment later, and then I turned off the tattoo machine.

Jakob collapsed onto the ground – he had apparently spent a lot more energy than I had thought on maintaining his posture.

A solid round of applause rang out, along with some enthusiastic gun-fire up into the air. The gun-fire startled me quite a bit – the heavy calibre mid-form guns everyone were using were a lot louder than human-sized rifles, but after the first few seconds of it I stopped being jittery.

Piotr rolled up and congratulated me on the marvellous entertainment: “Truly inspired – didn’t know you had it in you!”

“I’m not really British, but close enough – we do our best work when we make other people miserable” I said, recalling having read that in a history book or something the old wars between England and France back in high school. I didn’t quite explain that most of my inspiration for the ‘torture’ had come from old Jackass episodes and that god-awful Suicide Squad movie from back in the ‘10s.

Piotr was pleased as punch: “Well aren’t you merciful – now go get some sleep. You’ve brought us enough time that we won’t have to begin the assault as soon as we had expected, but we will still be attacking tomorrow before the high council can respond”

I nodded and headed off to the barracks. Making my way via the well-stomped dirt paths that criss-crossed the base, it struck me that I should have suggested Piotr to send someone to for a sheet of rub-on tattoos, the small sort with letters, so we could spell out ‘Spicy’ on Mr. Gilderstern’s forehead for when he woke up – just to mess with him. Oh that would have been so much fun.

Oh well, maybe there’d be time to suggest that in the morning – I didn’t even know how late it was, though the sky was pitch black. While the previous entertainment had postponed my sleepiness quite well, then my search for bedtime was bringing it back with a vengeance.

At the barracks I very quietly made my way to my room. The vast inner size of the tent made it difficult to get a proper feel of how far I was inside. Was it all an illusion, or was it truly bigger on the inside? Bloody magic.

In my room I absentmindedly began stripping off my army greens, when I turned to see Adia there. She had apparently beaten me to it with regards to stripping off the army greens – and didn’t give me much time to get mine off. I’ll leave what happened next up to the lurid imagination up to my fanfiction writers, though I doubt they’ll get all of it right.


	10. The End

Waking up mid-form was strange. I guess I had gotten used to my heightened senses during sleep – though Adia still smelled very nice, much more so than any human ever woman ever had to me. She was also still in mid-form from last night when I had first seen her in my room.

What struck me at first was how impossible it should be for the both of us to fit onto my bed... which upon slightly closer inspection was a lot bigger than I remembered it being. Furniture that expanded when there were more people on them? Really? Didn’t these people have better things to blow their magic on?

“Sleep well?” Adia asked, rolling over to face me. I honestly didn’t know what to say – but I sure wasn’t complaining!

I must have looked very funny and quite cross-eyed when her forked tongue flicked out to tickle my nose, because she laughed heartedly.

While the temptation to enjoy a bit more hanky panky was definitely there, then Adia reminded me that neither of us actually knew when the assault was going to begin – though she was happy that the originally planned 4:30 attack had been postponed thanks to my antics.

Getting washed up, dressed and kitted out so we were ready to go on stand-by didn’t take very long – helping each other to strap everyone on made things easy – plus it gave us time to talk a little, as well as indulge in just a little hanky panky. Adjusting the radio on the kit so I could speak into it properly took a bit of effort though – having a snout is weird when you’re not used to the extra distance from your neck out to your mouth.

I was chiefly curious as to why on earth Adia had... well... waited in my room to shag me rotten – again, not complaining, but... she hadn’t exactly hinted of any interest previously.

“Up until a day or so ago you were spoken for – hell, until yesterday Mel basically owned you – and what you said at the table in Tarsus? I had always thought that I was the one who was supposed to be thanklessly defending others...” Adia explained, patting my butt three or four times too many to be subtle while helping me strap on the harness that would hold my ammo and my oversized gun.

Oh yes, we both stayed in mid-form while getting ready – had to, because our weapons simply weren’t for humans to lug around. I felt a bit like the heavy weapons guy from Team Fortress 2.

It was a strange thought to consider, but Adia had been ordered by mother to spy on and watch over me, both knowing that I had effectively been sold to Mel’s family; she had previously rationalized it as simply being a necessary evil to prevent ‘important’ Nohde bloodlines from dying out. The spying bit was chiefly meant as an ongoing form of training, something she had done quite well since I don’t recall ever having seen her in or around campus.

We continued our small-talk during breakfast. To summarize the relevant points she basically pointed out that she had known that I was a nice guy worthy of building a relationship with for a while, but she had completely resigned herself to never being able to act on that – in fact, guardians weren’t supposed to have children... which of course raised the question of how my mother had gotten me. Adia didn’t know, but suspected that once a guardian became a knight and started working directly under a councillor, then the rules didn’t apply quite as much anymore.

“Yes, expecting our rulers to obey the same rules that they impose on the rest of us – how dare we” I said mockingly.

Adia smiled. If you had told me a month ago that on that day I would be considered lizard-women smiles incredibly cute and sexy... I would have looked at you funny. Didn’t change the fact that I found Adia very interesting right then and there. I really should have asked her what her plans for herself after all this were.

Two seconds later a klaxon sounded, followed by a voice over the PA system – it had that translation-spell quip to it: “Everyone report to the staging ground in front of the gate. Line up along the fences. Don’t mess with the animals”

I didn’t question the order – but what was up with the bit about animals?

Inhaling the last bits of fried rice and pork quickly, I followed Adia to the gate. There were indeed two rows of fences along the gate, making a corridor.

That corridor was full of pigs with... belts and belt-pouches?

No, not just belts. Bomb belts. These were suicide bomber pigs. And some of them even had ISIS and Al-Queda looking headbands put on – how hilariously haram. 

“Explain” I simply said to Adia, shaking my head in disbelief.

Adia shrugged, prefacing her explanation by stating that she had not really been clued into Piotr’s overall strategy for taking Feuerstein: “...but this? You remember that you can’t just chuck stuff through the portal, right? It has to be carried inside a living aura. I’m thinking this is how they’re going to bomb the castle before going through”

“Won’t they damage the gate on their side?” I asked, looking around in an attempt to get a head-count of how many people were there. We were a few thousand – at the very least. 

Apparently gates, when they held an open portal connection, became more or less indestructible. I found that exceedingly convenient, but Adia noted that if a true-form Nohde had to squeeze through, then the sides of the gate had to be crazy sturdy. I also noted that the bomb-belts on the pigs looked really small – there couldn’t be that much explosive in such small packs. That seemed an odd waste, since pigs of those sizes could probably have been laden with a lot of boom.

Piotr’s voice came on to the PA system: “This is it – it’s time to take down the last shreds of the council and mark this day in history, as the fall of the tyrannical regime that signed the most death-warrants since World War Two! A committee approved by several members of the high council has already been set up to oversee the transition period and new free elections for a proper dragon congress after this is over – we just need the old council gone. Send forth the bacon legion!”

Did you know that cattle prods look really utilitarian? Like, it makes no sense comparing them to tazers – despite very much being oversized tazers. Also, being in mid-form I could clearly pick up the whiffs of singed bacon whenever the pig-herders at the back of the column of suicide pig bombers goaded the herd towards the portal. I should mention that these pigs were fully grown – each probably weighed more than a grown man and made quite a lot of noise.

A dragon wizard activated the portal – and the pigs stormed through, having been whipped into a bit of a frenzy of squeals and grunts, and kept in the right direction by the metal barricades. Just before each pig passed through their bomb belts blinked twice with bright red LEDs. I was told that this showed that the bombs were now armed.

Above the gate a magical projection appeared. It looked like a live-feed from a camera drone high above a mountain... oh there was a castle hidden on the side of it – was that Feuerstein? I’m pretty sure it was.

The drone flew in a little closer, swooping directly in over the castle courtyard. The pig herd – around forty or so pigs in total – were all through the gate at this point.

Then explosions went off. There was no sound feed from the drone, but the shockwaves that burst up from the courtyard annihilated the drone in a split second. The magical projection switched to a secondary feed from a drone further away from the castle. There was a lot of smoke and dust.

“That... was a lot more explosion than I expected from those bomb-belts” I said, very surprised, to put it mildly.

I would later learn that the pigs themselves had been fed an alchemically altered fodder for the last several months, making their very flesh and fat potentially explosive. The bomb packs had simply been detonators, set to a count-down timer that had started once the pigs were through the portal. Just over four tons of explosive pig had gone off in that opening salvo. Points for creativity, but I think a few animal rights organizations would take issue with this if they ever heard about it.

The video feed showed two of the five castle towers collapsing – the crowd around me erupting into cheers.

I wondered if there would be anything left to fight – I would soon learn the answer to that:  
The barricades that had formed the pig-corridor were quickly removed, and everyone were ordered to form a long four man wide column towards the gate. Someone brought cows in to stand in front of us... what was with these people and livestock?

The cows, not cow Nohde mind you, had very primitive-looking but thick steel plates hung over their bodies and down their sides. They even had helmets on – though, it was weird helmets: they looked as if part of the helmets had been removed and replaced with strange boxes. Were they detonators like with the pigs? Why put those on their heads?

No, the cows were living cover I was told. Three such armoured cows were sent in a few seconds ahead of the first wave of shock troops – the half dozen mid-form dragons roared as they leapt into the discontinuity of the portal.

A few tense seconds passed – then one of the troops came back through the portal, quickly dodging out of the way of the portal and screaming: “Go go go!”

Thus the assault proper began. The four man wide column began moving – those in front first – we ultimately all just ran towards the portal. I was pumped, I was hyped, I was scared shitless, but I had Adia next to me, a friend, a lover, someone I knew actually cared for me.

I did wonder where mother was. I didn’t know that she had been part of the first half dozen shock troops that had gone through the portal – and in retrospect I believe I was much better off not having known that at the time.

Passing through the portal was an odd instantaneous change of scenery. Honestly, you have to try it – words can’t really describe it – going from humid tropics to dusty warzone.

To put words to the battlefield then part of my mind wanted to think video games: Why was obvious – plenty of video games put you into grand battles. Planetside 2, the Battlefield series, Call of Duty – though, none of them had half-dragon soldiers in it. They really should do that.

The air was thick with ash and dust, which made my nose itch like hell – why hadn’t we been issued gas masks or anything like that? Adia pulled me up behind an armored cow that was lying dead a bit from the portal. One side of the cow’s armor had been flipped up to give additional cover, and the sharp and metallic sounds of arrow-heads hitting that armor, or whizzing past us and hitting the dirt or torn up cobble, were constant if not a little erratic, but also very close to us.

The courtyard was a gigantic mess of scattered cobble and craters – a shame, for it had looked so nice last time I had been there. Corpses, or parts of corpses, were strewn everywhere – that they were caked in ash and dust made them look a lot less gory, for what blood that had been in them had mixed with the dust and clumped into red-brown bits of mud and gore. Or maybe it was because it was green scaly bodyparts, instead of obviously human ones? Also, there were bits of blown up pig everywhere, lending a bacon-flavoured scent to everything.

It wasn’t as noisy as I thought it would have be – sure, there was gunfire, but it was all from ‘my side’ – the return fire we got was in the form of arrows and crossbow bolts, which wasn’t really noise. It was those magical arrows that I had been told about, and the sounds they made as they hit the ground or the cow armor just wasn’t that intimidating, even though I knew they were dangerous.

Taking cover behind the cow, a nearby officer started barking out orders – too bad they were Indonesian. Adia seemed to understand, and so I followed her from our cover behind the dead cow to cover behind some rubble – rubble that looked to have once been one of the castle towers, but it was down in the courtyard now.

Taking a few potshots at a spot where I think some of the arrows were coming from – it was difficult to see due to all the dust, and they had the high ground – I tried to look around. There were already several of our lads who injured. The few I could see had arrows poking out of them, which didn’t look very pleasant, but not necessarily immediately lethal either, depending on where they had been hit.

Others were dragging the wounded back through the gate, while loads more rebel fighters were pouring through and seeking cover. Now, the archers we were up against seemed quite smart: most of them were firing arrows at the portal, trying to pick off people coming through or those trying to leave – so that was also why the extended cow-cover had been deployed around the gate.

I couldn’t see that mother had hauled a wounded soldier through the gate – but considering what happened next, then I would later be quite thankful that she had gotten out of harms way.

You see, one thing that Piotr had never really talked much about to his troops was how much we were out-gunned when it came to magic. Sure, we had guns with dragon-killer bullets, but they had magic weapons and whatnot. Of course, from what I had seen so far, up to that point, of how Nohde magic and wizardry worked, then spells weren’t just something you casually cast – they took time to set up, or conjure.

While we had been trying to secure the courtyard and shoot any remaining archers still trying to pick us off, their wizards had enjoyed plenty of time, as had the master sorcerers of the council, to power up their battle magic and dread spells.

That was not a good thing – at least not for us.

First a great wind ripped down into the courtyard, forcing all the clouds of dust and ash away – it also knocked the air out of most of us.

Adia gave me a look of absolute dread and dropped her gun as she began to desperately check her pockets...

“Where is it, where is it?”

A heavily cloaked figure silently appeared in the middle of the courtyard in a dim flash of light. Whoever it was, the person was wielding a staff – not the Piotr-zapper I had seen in videos previously, but it had similar features and glowed menacingly.

With all the dust gone the arrow-fire intensified. Sure, now it was possible to see the archers a lot more clearly as they peeked out of broken windows, or from behind furniture in rooms where the outer walls had collapsed, but they could see us a lot better too, and they had the high ground and better cover, even as our bullets tore as the castle walls. We should have brought more rockets and grenade launchers.

Most of our troops on the ground began shooting at the wizard – but the wizard had a magical forcefield or something up. Again, that kind of magic wasn’t the sort you just casually put up, but this wizard had clearly spent the time since the attack began preparing, or maybe others had helped?

“Here! Damnit, only one – no...” Adia said, sounding oddly crestfallen.

I didn’t bother looking at her, keeping my eyes and my gun trained on the wizard, trying to shoot holes in the magic shield the blighter had up. It wasn’t working very well.

The wizard raised its staff – a bright purple light beginning to shine from its tip. Adia quickly yanked me down into cover and gave me a quick kiss: “Tell you mother I did my duty love!”

Adia then bit into... something – probably the thing she had been looking for a moment earlier, for I could hear glass breaking – and then she bit me in the neck. Now, when what amounts of a raptor with a mouth that looked very ‘dinosaur’ bites you, you feel it. It is not a pleasant feeling. Sure, she wasn’t trying to bite my head off, but she had pierced my skin, that much I could feel – and it hurt like hell.

Before I could object, pull away, or even tell her to get off the purple light from the wizard pulsed and just became ever-present. I couldn’t see anything other than purple. Hell, I could smell it.

For a brief moment I couldn’t feel anything other than the color purple – I couldn’t even feel Adia biting me. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s magic for you.

When the light eased off Adia was gone – sort of. I had been holding on to her around her waist – now I was only holding on to her shirt and body armor. Her utility belt, pants and boots were lying on the ground.  
In disbelief I dropped Adia’s kit and took a step back. I saw that around my arms, myself in general really, there was a slight purple shimmer, which quickly faded away. I should note that a week or so after all this had passed, me and my mother tracked down Adia’s family and held a very nice memorial, anyway, I was still in a warzone: The noise picked up again as my mind came fully back into focus – gun fire here and there, and the whistling of arrows through the air. I grabbed mine and Adia’s guns and dove for cover.

What had just happened? Some kind of death-magic? Mass teleport? Looking around from cover, I saw several other piles of kit and weapons – a dozens, if not hundreds of other Nohde that had just vanished.

With far fewer people shooting at them, the archers were able to concentrate their fire on the few remaining rebel fighters there were left.

I saw the wizard move towards the gate – loads of piles of kit and guns around it, but new fighters were still coming through... until the wizard cast a spell at the gate which closed the connection. That was bad.

Dragon Nohde with swords and heavy shields then stormed the ruined courtyard – we were hopeless outnumbered at this point. Shooting at them wildly didn’t halt their advance – they ran towards us even when riddled with bullets, only stopping when they fell due to terminal injuries like headshots or having their legs completely blown off. The ones without legs would crawl towards us – the black knight from Monty Python would have been proud.

It struck me that the sword-wielding gits had probably been put on that mind-control spell, to make them ignore their injuries and any incoming gunfire – just like Mel had with the kill-team back in Cyprus! If nothing else, then that very much sounded like something the council would order; sacrificing their own troops by turning them into what amounted to sword-wielding zombies.

The worst part was the few other rebel fighters I could see, when the sword-zombies reached them – a few tried to surrender... but were still just cut down. So much for taking prisoners.

I of course had the same problem – I had at least two dozen mindless dragons-at-arms coming at me, each with an enchanted sword magically ensorcelled for maximum dismemberment and dragon-slicing. I was not particular keen on indulging them.

The only plus side of the courtyard having been swarmed, was that the arrow fire had let up. They weren’t stupid enough to fire into a melee with their own troops.

To keep away from the swordsmen I mainly fired my guns aimed low – these sword-zombies weren’t wearing body armor, but the shields they were using were either too thick for bullets to pierce, or had magic on them to make them bullet-proof. I didn’t exactly stop to check or ask.

Shooting out their legs worked eerily well – they weren’t scattering or fanning out to encircle me, even though they had me up against the edge of the courtyard most of the time. They were swarming me like, well... zombies – mindlessly just trying to close the distance to me, regardless of upcoming obstacles or where I was pointing my guns.

Running, looking back over my shoulder, and taking pot-shots at their legs –this wasn’t the kind of multitasking I had imagined I would be doing that day.

One thing I did notice: The clothes that the sword-wielding Nohde chasing me were wearing. It wasn’t military uniforms, or the red and grey enforcer and knight uniforms I had seen back in Tarsus.

They were wearing... casual clothes – a few were wearing what sort of looked like black suit with tie. Had the council mind-slaved the castle staff?! I would later confirm that to be the case – and that was bloody horrible.

It was with that nagging suspicion that I suddenly found it really difficult to actually shoot these people. Yes, they were trying to kill me, but they were in effect mind-controlled non-combatants.

At the time I hadn’t familiarized myself with my kit well enough to just tug something off and chuck it at my pursuers – I couldn’t’ tell a flashbang from grenade.

On the plus side, keeping my distance with the mind-zombies was getting easier – the Nohde chasing me weren’t wearing body armor that was enchanted to keep you from getting exhausted like I was. Again, this wasn’t something I knew at the time, but something I had explained to me later. At the time I thought it was being a recently enlightened Nohde that gave me more energy – while my pursuers seemed to tire, plus the ones in front would stumble the rest when they fell to having their legs blown out.

I just kept sprinting like a mad cunt and even tried blasting them with my lightning breath – but that was really hard to aim when you running and looking over your shoulder.

In passing, I noticed that the wizard was doing something to the gate. I didn’t know what he or she was doing, but I could tell that no new portal from the rebel base was opening up – I figured the wizard was blocking incoming connections.

Shooting at the wizard did nothing, that I already knew. I also knew that I was being chased by a growing horde of mindless Nohde, for apparently I was the last rebel fighter left in the courtyard... which of course was a bad thing for me, but I was aware of it none the less.

In my favour, sort of, was the fact that the wizard seemed terribly preoccupied with keeping the gate portal closed. Thus, I simply ran right up past the joker – I didn’t tackle the wizard, figuring that losing speed would probably result in the mindless mob slicing me to ribbons.

In simply running right past the wizard, the mob of mind-slaves crashed into the wizard as they mindlessly ran towards me – success! But sadly, this only stumbled half a dozen or so mind-slaves. The rest of the swarm continued pursuit, but it did buy me a few precious seconds to think.

The wizard swore loudly, as the mind-slaves stumbled over each other to go after me – the voice of the wizard was a female one. Ok, so... wizardess?

Looking around quickly, I saw a door relatively clear of rubble that led into the castle. Scrambling over to it, I didn’t quite manage to halt my running before hitting the door, but luckily it opened inward as I crashed into it. 

Slamming the door behind me, I waited a few tense seconds if the mind-slaves were going to bash the door in. They didn’t. Why? Who knows? Maybe they had a ‘out of sight, out of mind’ thing going on?

Someone tapped me on the shoulder – I turned to look – and was kicked in the face and blacked out. Would not recommend the experience.

I woke up in what looked to be the same room, but naked, tied up and on the floor. Being in mid-form made me feel oddly not naked – I was later told that that was quite normal for Nohde who grew up more human than Nohde.

Around me stood a bit over a dozen knights in mid-form. Their swords sheathed, their grey and red uniforms looking very dusty – the castle guard?

Either way I was quite happy that I hadn’t simply been killed. Seeing that I had woken up, I was untied and ordered to my feet. They made sure that I understood, in no uncertain terms, that I only needed to give them an excuse and they would cut me down.

As if we were putting on The Emperor’s New Clothes, I was escorted quite naked under armed guard through the castle. The richly decorated carpeting felt good on my bare dragon feet. It struck me that unlike the last time I had been in the castle some five or so days ago, that this time I was feeling oddly confident.

Maybe it was a fatalistic thing – for I honestly thought that I was being led to an execution or torture chamber- but at the same time, then like Adia had said earlier: I had for once actually chosen this myself For once, for the first time in all of this, then I had willingly signed up for this. Sure, I might not have fully understood what I had gotten myself into, but I had ultimately volunteered out of my own free will.  
I was thus presented to the council, naked, and uncloaked of lies – for the councillors there knew damn well why I was had come this time, and they did not look amused.

The council chamber looked a good deal worse for wear. It occurred to me that it wasn’t the same council chamber as last... or at least, part of it was not the same: The large thick oaken table in the middle was the same, but the windows and wall decorations were different – so... they had probably moved things around a bit, probably in anticipation of an attack. All the councillors were in mid-form, probably because being human made you too vulnerable.

The windows showed the outer mountainside – so this room was not facing into the courtyard. This made sense, since every wall facing the courtyard had been blasted to bits. It was a nice view – and I felt absolutely no compulsion to pay attention to the council now that I had such a lovely vista to enjoy.

“Do you find this amusing?” Councilor Maria Esteban asked. Unlike my last appearance before the council, her jolly old granny attitude was gone – this time she sounded like a sour old granny who’s good china you had just broken.

“No I find this council – what’s left of it – to be full of tyrants and honorless gits. Does the term ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis’ ring any bells?” I replied, not bothering to face the councillor. If anything, I was looking for the rebel camera drones outside, but couldn’t see any through the windows.

Councillor Esteban growled at me – well that’s what it sounded like – and shot back: “I released you from the shadows! Is this how you repay us?”

“It was this council’s laws and rules that put me in the shadows to begin with. It was this council’s laws that barred me from knowing who and what my mother really is, who my father was, or that I had effectively been sold into slavery – though in Mel’s defence she never put much of a leash on me” I mused, feeling all kinds of righteous indignation well up in me. If I was going to be sentenced to death, then I would do in proud defiance.

Councillor Esteban balked at my statement – maybe she hadn’t expected me to be clued in on so much in such a short amount of time?

The lack of a reply from her told me plenty – but why not rub it in? I turned to face the rest of council. I saw that the knights that had stripped me had brought my kit along – apparently Kurt was examining my gun and my bullet-proof vest.

“And those two spicy individuals – boy spice and slag spice there – he challenges me to a duel over breaking a rule nobody had told me of. I defeat him by getting him to forfeit – and what do I get? They sent their Gilderstern assassins after me, damn near killed me and my betrothed!” I stated, quite spitefully. That I had referred to Mel as my betrothed was chiefly because I had gotten impression from Councillor Esteban that she was likely a big fan of old-school marriage practices, so it might hit her all the harder.

I couldn’t quite tell if it worked – but what I hadn’t been aware of was that Esteban hadn’t known of the attempted death-squad hit. The look on her face, the sudden twist of fury, the outrage – oh it was delicious, and now it was aimed at the two Gilderstern twats.

I should mention that in addition to the two Gildersterns, and Councillor granny, then there was a fourth councillor present: It was a positively ancient-looking man in mid-form. Even his green scales had grey tips. He was asleep, and appeared as if he had been asleep since before the assault had begun... made for quite the first impression.

Councillor Esteban got up and stomped over to the old councillor. Raising her staff up she whacked him hard with it. This woke the old man up – barely.

With a voice that only added more evidence to my suspicion that the man actually would fart dust, the old dragon looked up and grouched: “Control yourself woman!”

“Did you authorize that termination?”

The old man grouched again, saying that he didn’t know anything about any termination – I assumed that they meant an order to have me and Mel killed. Apparently then council rules stated that you needed approval from at least two councillors to order a hit. Basically, the Gilderstern’s had done a naughty. 

Councilor Esteban was furious: “You two idiots do realize that its exactly that kind of behavior that Vlademkin and his co-conspirators are trying to kill us over?!”

“Can I just say that I find it absolutely hilarious that you’re acting this outraged over this, considering what you’ve done with that staff you’re holding?” I said, wondering to myself if Esteban was putting on an act to somehow lessen any punishment she might get, if she to be captured by the rebels. She gave me a brief look of incredulousness, as if to say “What are you talking about?”. 

“Killing Piotr’s lover and crippling him for life – because what? They were gay? I had hoped that this council was just a little more modern than ISIS” I said with the utmost of British spite, trying to pay close attention to the reaction of the councillors.

The old dragon scoffed, looking very much not impressed by my accusation. Eva Gilderstern averted her gaze – I guess that counted in her favour, if she was feeling ashamed of the actions of the council, but it could just as well be because she hadn’t been on the council when that had been done. Kurt was ignoring me, trying to figure out how to work my gun – had he never used a firearm? Councillor Esteban’s reaction was a serious and offended look in my direction. I couldn’t quite discern what she had in mind. Was she trying to come up with an excuse for the council’s behaviour, or was she debating with herself if her actions had been wrong or right?

The silence lasted a few seconds when Kurt looked up and sighed loudly, pointing my gun at me: “Oh come on – just freaking ask him already! Mr. Mannheim, do you have any information on where to find the usurper headquarters? Yes or no! No, more bullshit!”

I got the distinct impression that my life would end very quickly if I said no.

Thinking for a moment, my train of thought found itself derailed when my phone rang. The ring-tone came from behind me, from one of the knights holding my kit.

It rang once. 

It rang twice.

“Can I answer that before I answer your question?” I said, feeling oddly cheeky in the face of death – I mean, if they were just going to use Esteban’s staff to zap me or my own gun to shoot me, what did it matter?

Esteban made an annoyed gesture for the knight with my phone to hand it to me.

“Dead man talking” I answered the phone in a chipper tone.

Piotr’s voice came through – loudly – on speakerphone: “Oh don’t talk like that – now put the phone on the table so we can negotiate properly”

Councillor Esteban didn’t look amused: “We do not negotiate with terrorists!”

Piotr Vlademkin, speaking from the phone, replied in kind: “And I don’t really want to negotiate with murderous tyrants, but here we are”

Kurt made a somewhat spiteful gesture at the phone, as if Piotr was supposed to be able to see it, and brandished my gun at the phone: “You idiot – we have your guns, we have your armor – you can’t touch us!”

“Indeed, you have the weapons and armor of some sixty soldiers – and a mob of mind-controlled servants shambling around in your courtyard, most of which are bleeding to death. I am so very intimidated” Piotr replied sarcastically. I couldn’t help but smirk.

This back and forth continued for a bit – Kurt and the old councillor mainly talking to Piotr, getting increasingly riled up.

“Vlademkin, you must realize that we are at the very least in a stalemate. If you send more troops through our gate, we will simply shoot them – using your own guns. Our knights are far better trained marksmen than any militia you can have, and between our defensive wards and your armor you’re not going to be able to shoot anyone here anymore” Councillor Esteban proclaimed, giving me a distinct impression that she wanted Piotr to give them an offer to end the conflict that didn’t involve a flat out surrender.

It took a few seconds before Piotr replied: “You’re right – I can already tell that you’re equipping your gate guard with my weapons and equipment thanks to the telemetry sensors in them. My forces still outnumber you ten to one – you’ll run out of ammunition long before I run out of soldiers to throw at you”

On one hand, Piotr’s bold claim horrified me. He had never struck me as someone who would willingly throw the lives of those who supported his cause so freely, unless they were pigs – but his tone, he had not sounded as if he spoke in jest, and if nothing else then he was playing this to win.

I was not the only one who found that statement disconcerting. Councillor stand-in Eva Gilderstern looked down right horrified – I guess she never expected to have to deal with life and death decisions while sitting in for her father. She shook her head in disbelief and said: “...and you call us murderous? You complete hypocrite”

“Please. I’m no hypocrite – I just enjoy bringing you the same terror that you’ve brought to everyone else when you’ve sent out your hit-squads” the voice from the phone sounded.

There was an uncomfortable pause. The silence was unbearable: nobody wanted to be the first to gainsay such a claim – because it was undeniable at this point that council had more than enough blood on its hands to justify the extreme measures being used to take them down. From the mindless sword-zombies roaming the courtyard as they slowly bled out from having been shot, to the seemingly unchecked use of death-squads – Piotr had no need to excuse his actions, and there was no moral high-ground for the council to grandstand on.

“Right – it looks like everyone is in position. Tell me Fred, do you know who’s wearing your armor right now?” Piotr suddenly asked.

“Kurt?” I blurted out – caught off guard by the seemingly random question.

The councillors looked a little confused at the question as well. I saw the radio-unit on my armor blinked twice with a red LED. 

“Great, then I’ll forego any count-down. Terribly sorry Fred, but I need to finish this before high council troops show up” the phone sounded.

I went limp, the two knights that held my arms suddenly finding themselves yanked down by my mid-form weight. Their grip loosened by the surprise, I tried to twist around so they would cover me...

...because the next thing anyone knew the castle was rocked by a huge explosion, but mid-shock – just as everyone had sensed the explosions and begun to flinch or otherwise react – my body-armor, which Kurt was wearing, blew up.


	11. A Call For Restoration

Having had time to think before writing this, I poked around online for testimonies of people who survived explosions up close. That your hearing is absolutely buggered afterwards is very common. That said, then the most common injuries would usually be from shrapnel, ripping you to shreds as things were blasted apart and thrown around. I had been covered enough to avoid most of that, both from the thick oaken table between me and the council and the two knights crouched over me. Or maybe I had been knocked out for long enough for any smaller wounds to heal? I honestly have no idea – getting the exact details on such an explosion is not easy, but suffice to say then I did survive the blast – how else would I have written this book about it all?

One thing I had not been shielded from at all was the shockwave.

The shockwave, aside from deafening me, knocked everyone around – but being mid-form, I was so much tougher and healed from most of the bruises fairly quickly. Mind you, that also applied to everyone else.

My mid-form regeneration also restored my hearing fairly quickly – not that that helped my disorientation or anything like that: The air was thick with dust, and I could hear things falling down around me left and right – but I couldn’t see anything.

The castle groaned – it sounded very much as if the whole place was coming down. Then there was the issue of the handful of knights which had been behind me, who also seemed to mostly have survived the blast.

I couldn’t tell where I was, what direction to scramble away to – I couldn’t even really see where the other survivors were, though I could hear a few. Well, survivors might be an exaggeration: There were people screaming, crying out for missing limbs and more of those lovely shrapnel wounds I had lucked out on. 

You couldn’t regenerate limbs that had been torn off, nor start the process if you had six tons of broken bricks crushed into your chest and skull.

Trying to extract myself from the rubble was surprisingly difficult – I couldn’t tell what I trapped under, because everything had that lovely mortar-dust grey color, interspersed with broken red bricks and shattered timbers.

Feeling around, I concluded that I was actually being pinned down by part of the huge wooden table that had stood in the middle of the room. How to fix that?

Trying to breathe was difficult – the weight on my chest from the table was crushing, and if I had been in human form I would probably have been squished into a jammy dodger – but I managed to breathe in enough horribly dusty air that I could exhale my breath. My dragon breath.

Aiming the lightning was difficult – at first it arc all over the place, but I quickly figured that I could purse my lips to ‘aim’ the lightning. After that it was a bit like using a jittery welding torch, only at range.

Aiming the lightning at the greatest weight on my chest I quickly got myself showered in hot rubble and debris, as the lightning burned and exploded the wood.

With a loud crack the bit of table pinning me broke, at least enough for me to worm my way out and into an upright position, though it still felt as if I was a lump of wool stuff in a Velcro vice, as there were still plenty of pointy bits ripping atme.

The dust was still everywhere – making it difficult to see anything, though the groans and cries of wounded knights came through all too clearly.

Trying to get away from the post-apocalyptic looking scene, I found most of the doors – or blasted open doorways – blocked by rubble, collapsed roof beams and other parts of the castle that had simply collapsed then I wasn’t really thinking of her at that moment.

One positive thing about the camera drone – which was actually quite big – was that its oversized rotors were blowing much of the dust away.

This revealed a collapsed wooden beam that led up and away from the blasted council room. It also revealed that there wasn’t really a roof over my head anymore. I had no idea how big a chunk of the castle was missing – but it was probably huge.

Getting away from the dead and dying was surprisingly refreshing – the oddly quick transition from blasted ruin to opulent fantasy castle was a bit jarring. Walking around naked and leaving a trail of dust and dusty footprints finally began to feel a bit weird.

Being out of the dust clouds made cleaning up an option – which at the time felt like a prerequisite to putting on some clothes: Using a very nice curtain as a towel to roughly clear off the dust, I blew my nose in it a few times as well. I know it sounds weird to focus on that, but finally being able to breathe? In mid-form breathing through your mouth was weird enough, since your tongue is so much more sensitive to scents in the air, but the air had been thick with dust, which made breathing through my mouth unbearable.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I looked around for something – anything – to dress myself in. It was in doing so that it occurred to me just how desolate the place was.

It made sense that there weren’t anyone around: All the servants were mind-slaved and running around in the courtyard, all the castle guards had either blown up using salvaged armor – and the ones that had been to guard the council weren’t exactly any better off.

The thought that I was all alone in the castle, for some reason that I still don’t quite understand, terrified me more than anything else.

I felt hungry. I later learned that after healing a lot of injuries in mid-form you would be very hungry – your body still needed nutrients to fuel all that magic speedy healing.

Walking around, naked, in a deserted castle that groaned every minute – as if the structure was debating with itself on whether it should collapse completely or not – was eerie. That old prayer, so often parroted in movies and whatnot, about walking in the shadow of the valley of death? I can only say, try it first, then come and tell me how bloody fearless you’ll be.

I had no idea where I was going – the castle seemed endless. Did it have magic on it to make the inside bigger than the outside too? Fucking TARDIS bullshit.

In a long hall with a very big mirror along the length of it I made a grim discovery: I had a fairly large broken bit of wood sticking out of my back. Well that explained why I wasn’t really hurting that much – I was in shock! When I had cleaned myself off with the curtain I had even snagged on it a few times, but I had thought it was the small spines that ran along the small of my back.

It wasn’t terribly difficult to decide that I should pull it out – I figured that my regeneration would fix the wound in no time. The trick would be to get it out before the shock wore off, because then I would really start to feel it. Hell, I would probably start to feel all the aches in body at that point.

The difficult part was actually grabbing hold of the thing and pulling it out – it was in that lovely sweet spot on your back that you simply can’t reach.

A solution presented itself when I peeked through a nearby doorway: It was some kind of study – it had a fireplace, and tongs to fiddle with the firewood. Tongs acquired, I managed to pull the bit of wood out of myself... and fuck me with a cactus chainsaw: that hurt... oh it hurt. Would not recommend the experience, even to people I don’t like.

It was as if removing the large carrot sized splinter from my back somehow made my body remember pain – all of the pain. The pain from all of my muscles which somehow suddenly felt as they had each been pounded with meat hammers. The pain from my bones, which all suddenly seemed to creak and groan, as if they were all a single Newton of force away from breaking in twain. The pain from my head, which throbbed worse than that one time I nearly had gotten cooked alive at the uni foundry due to that faulty heat-reflection suit. Did it hurt less than when I had woken up without an arm? Not sure, not interested in doing a comparative study.

My vision swam, my hearing dimmed and my balance failed me: I collapsed on the floor, crying, as all the pain from having been blown up a little too much flooded over me. Wouldn’t recommend the experience, especially if you are trying to hide from anyone.

While in my misery-trance I lost all track of time. This was a bad thing – for while I had been quick to get away from the bombed council room, then I would bid you fair reader to recall that I had mentioned that there had been other survives there. Sure, those other survivors had all been far worse injured than me, but they had also been trained soldiers part of a magical para-military organization, many of which likely knew healing magic.

I don’t know when they found me – but in retrospect I had probably bled from my back, or dragged a trail of dust around that they could follow.

Being in the state I was in, I wasn’t really receptive to any of their attempts to get my attention. I’m sure they tried shouting at me, maybe kicking or hitting me – though that presumed that they still had their arms and legs – they couldn’t regenerate limbs lost to the blast without special healing magic.

I know that I woke up somewhere that wasn’t the hallway. My hearing was still shit from the haze of pain, but I could make out male and female voices. I could only smell blood – and breathing through my nose hurt a lot – but opening my mouth to breathe wasn’t possible, as I had found myself sporting a few wraps of duct-tape around my snout. Apparently then dragon Nohde were a bit like crocodiles: we could bite down hard, but not open our mouths hard.

Moving still hurt – but I was tied up with... something – I couldn’t tell what, but it didn’t feel like zip-ties or duct-tape. Bound on both hands and feet, with my hands behind me, I didn’t have much in options, so I focused on breathing and listening.

It took a bit before the blurry voices I could hear came into focus. At first I found it confusing, but then I realized that I was listening to a phone conversation.

“...up! We want free passage through the gate, no track-backs, and a memory lock on whoever opens the gate! No negotiation! It’s this or we send down another piece!”

Another piece? Of what? Of me? Oh, I was being held for ransom – used as a bargaining chip by the knights to buy them free passage out of the castle.

I was flipped around so my ass was up to the ceiling – this was not done in a gentle fashion. Mind you, I didn’t focus on that nearly as much as when one of my captors began cutting into my tail. I remember screaming, though I don’t really remember it hurting – though it stands to reason that it did hurt; why else would I have screamed?

“You idiot, use an anaesthetic spell before you cut him or he’ll give away whe-“ a male voice said, before getting cut off by some very loud gunfire.

I should note that while I could somewhat hear what people were saying, then the sharp sounds of automatic weapons fire didn’t quite register to me. It sounded very distant, but I could just about make out the dark room lighting up by the muzzle flashes.

Someone fell over me – but whoever it was didn’t get to stay there for long. The weight lifted and I was gently rolled over. Being able to mainly only see light and darkness, everything else being a blur, I had no clue who my saviours were. I didn’t know it was just one Nohde.

As I was picked up and jostled around something must have been knocked loose – for I blacked out.  
The next bit I only know from what I’ve been told:

Mel had somehow talked Piotr into letting her join the second assault on the castle, after the alchemical armor-bombs had completely annihilated most of what was left of the castle’s defences. She had supposedly rushed ahead of the column through the gate – much to the annoyance of the officers in charge of the attack, not that there was much to attack left: The mind-controlled servants had been lined up in front of the castle guard, so they had largely all been blown up along with the castle guard who had been wearing scavenged rebel armor. The wizard who had been locking the gate up hadn’t been caught in the blast, but had still been more than close enough to have been thoroughly tossed around like a ragdoll by the blast – she had not been in any condition to do magic, let alone breathe properly.

This wasn’t to say that there hadn’t been any resistance left in the courtyard when Mel had emerged – there had been a few of the mind-controlled servants left, the ones who had been furthest by the blast and shielded by everyone else – but they had been so few and still so injured that Mel had been able to shoot them quite easily, even with her sub-par marksmanship skills... well, she had never fired a gun in her life, but spray and pray worked well enough for her. 

Mel had rushed into the castle ruins, looking for me – but I had been found, captured and hidden away at that point. It had been when one of my captors had forgotten to use a pain-killer spell on my tail, before trying to cut another bit of it off to show that they meant business.

Even watching the footage from the body-cam on her armor – which wasn’t a secret magic bomb vest, that had apparently only been for the first wave – didn’t really give off the proper sense of urgency. She had just seen me survive the explosion and rushed to rescue me.

She had brought me back through the gate to the rebel base. The medics there had me up to my ear-holes in healing magic in no time – but even then my injuries were not simply something that could be solved with a flick of a wand, not that wands was really a thing as I would later learn.

The true extent of my injuries, if catalogued and put into print, would have rendered even Tolstoy hesitant. Suffice to say that most of my bones had suffered some kind of hydroshock from the alchemical explosive’s blast-wave, the marrow having been pulped. I have no clue if that’s normal for people who survive close encounters to explosions, human or Nohde, but it was just one of many injuries I had sustained. Most of my internal organs had also been utterly brutalized – it was days before I stopped peeing blood. My stool looked even worse: I think I shat organ tissue for a while.

On top of the direct ‘things that the explosion broke’ I had apparently also been healed too much and not gotten enough to eat, not that I had been able to eat. Basically my body had started breaking down muscle tissue to spend those resources on regenerating more critical bits of me – like the crack in my skull, or the cranial haemorrhaging I had apparently suffered right after the blast. I regenerated so much, so fast, that I had gotten very close to sporting that French runway model/world war 2 concentration camp survivor look, at least until the medics got a tube in me to pump some liquid food into me.

It ultimately took me a bit over a week to recover – when I came to, I had been moved to Mel’s parents’ home. While I was happy that I wasn’t in pain – indeed I felt bloody amazing – then with what I knew about Mel’s parents at that point, it did turn into a bit of a tense reunion.

It didn’t help much either that me and Mel quite obviously needed to have a very serious talk about ‘us’ – so initially I held my tongue at her parents. That I had slept with Adia – and that we apparently both knew this – also made things really awkward.

Having woken up a bit after lunch on whatever day it was that I finally recovered enough to become mobile again, I ended up spending most of that afternoon recording videos and doing skype calls – the new transition government and its group of judges and special prosecutors all urgently wanted testimony from me on my experiences with the council. It smelled like the second coming of the Nuremberg trials – it will probably be fun to read about once it was all done, but this book will likely be out before that if Piotr has anything to say about it.

In the evening, after a dinner where I didn’t really say a word – excusing myself with still trying to comprehend everything that had happened to me, I finally got some alone-time with Mel, both of us in human form by her request – you never knew when a paparazzi with a telephoto lens was peeking.

We sat on a balcony, overlooking the curiously not-so-humid gardens in front of the Kasih estate. Initially I had only one burning question: “Why did you come and rescue me?”

Mel, looking gorgeous in the evening sun, looked very much as if she had been both dreading and anticipating that very question, answered without any hesitation: “Because you needed it. The drone that saw you crawl out of the ruins – everyone else just cheered, but I’ve seen you stagger around drunk. That was different. You were hurt and you couldn’t even see the thing sticking out of your back”

I couldn’t really argue with that logic – and yet part of me wanted to, because of all the other things from earlier. That left another issue I felt needing addressing: “What about Adia?”

“What about her? We had broken up, you were fair game, and by your own account she had vetted you thoroughly and found you as attractive as I do” Mel said in a very matter of factly tone, sounding just a little too happy that it was her who had ‘won out’ in that little competition.

I can’t it was a bad answer – but even then… part of me wanted her to be a lot more upset: “Don’t give me that cold-hearted Asian nonsense. Any other girl I know would have been crushed to know that their ex-fiance was banging their friend less than a day after their breakup”

It was clear on her face that there were different parts of her struggling for control. No doubt parts of her wanted to express anger and frustration, but I guess she had spent a lot of the time I had been recovering thinking this through: “It just shows how close I was to losing you – I’ll have to make it up to you somehow, plus I’ll need to be more careful in the future”

At first that didn’t quite make sense, but she quickly explained to me that I had apparently received a lot of fan-mail, thanks to Piotr having broadcast my final audience with the council. It was almost as if having unintentionally become the face of a popular rebellion made you into an instant celebrity to quite a lot of people. 

“I promise I won’t make my harem too large” I joked – receiving a punch on my shoulder that would likely have killed mere mortals.

Tumbling over on the balcony until I hit the railing, I found my attempt at getting up again hindered by a foot in a nice designer shoe: “Frederik Emil Mannheim, I have stolen firearms for you. I have shot people for you. I did not drag you out of a burning castle ruin for you to set up a fucking harem!”

The look on her face – the anger, mixed with an increasing mirthful smirk – was just perfect. This was the Mel I knew from back in Bristol: Straight-forward, not afraid to speak her mind, and never shy of voicing her displeasure – not the browbeaten family servant I had to witness during dinner with her parents.

Taking hold of her foot and shifting into mid-form, I quickly overpowered her. A second or so later I stood up on the balcony, holding Mel up in a straight arm by her left ankle, Mel dangling in the air: “Darling I would never – and you know it, though behaviour like that will get you punished”

Did I mention that Mel had revealed that she had fantasized for ages about me doing her in mid-form while she was in human form? She had quite explicitly mentioned it while catching me up on current events earlier, after I had woken up. This put what she did to me back on that train into a slightly different light – it was still a traumatic experience, won’t deny that, but now I understood why she had done it, sort of: she had been projecting her own kink onto me. 

Thus Mel didn’t object to me tossing her up over my shoulder and carrying her back inside to our room – in fact, she squealed like a giddy asian schoolgirl.

There you have it – a story that started with a shooting massacre at a museum, ending up with me describing my girlfriend’s big kink. Lovely right?

Oh, but you say, what happened with Piotr after the rebellion was over, the interim government, the trials of the captured councillors?

Why on earth should I waste ink on that – all those events are documented just fine online. Why should I waste time dramatizing what you can find on bloody Nohdepedia in fifteen seconds?

The End


End file.
